RANDOM THOUGHTS

Not much news to comment on, but there are always Tories to talk about.

THIS IS WHY WE NEED TO CONTROL OUR FINANCES

So, those of us who can be forgiven for thinking that the removal of Lansley from the English health brief last week was the precursor to a U-turn on dismantling the NHS, were wrong.

The man who replaces him has even co-authored a book which says that service is no longer relevant.

It probably isn't to people as rich as Mr Hunt, but what a short memory Mr Cameron must have.

Of course, this, at first glance, has nothing at all to do with us. The NHS in Scotland is a separate institution, working on similar principles, but travelling  in a different direction from its English partner since 2007. It is run at political level by a Cabinet Secretary for Health and Well-Being. Co-incidentally, the holder of that post was also shuffled this week when Nicola Sturgeon was replaced by Alex Neil.

Under devolution, the Health Service in Scotland receives from the central UK pot of taxes, a Barnett formula proportion of the money spent on the English service. (Of course it is part of a block grant which covers all of the devolved departments, and the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Finance makes a decision about how much of that grant is spent on the HNS in Scotland). However, the overall grant would shrink if the English NHS were to be replaced by a private insurance-based scheme.

Thus if a devolved Scotland wished to carry on with no questions medical treatment, free at the point of delivery, there would likely be less money with which to do it.

Devolved we may be, but many a decision taken in by English ministers, even on functions which are devolved, reflects upon our abilities to deliver that service in the way that we would want.

That is why we need control of our own finances. That way we have no multi-millionaire Tories telling us that free treatment is no longer a priority for Scots.

*Click on image to enlarge.

THEY MUST NOT DO THIS TO US: IT'S NOT THE SCOTTISH WAY

The Tory semi privatisation of the health service in England has worried a lot of my mates who live there, but they have constantly been reassured that they have nothing to worry about. Not that it seems that way to me when Lansley's plans allow for hospitals to be funded up to 47% by private patients.


Who, you ask yourself, will get the best nurses, the most competent doctors, the best equipment; and who will have their rooms cleaned to a professional standard by the best cleaners? If there is an emergency, who will get the defibrillator first? I'll give you a guess. It won't be people in the 53% [always assuming that the Tories don't up it to 50% or 60% private, and that the hospitals themselves don't cheat on their figures.]

Never mind that doctors' practices may be bought over by companies who can close them down and open a massive clinic miles away to save money, or that they may sell them on to JP Morgan, G4S or French Railways at a profit.


No. Don't worry. There will be a regulator... and we all know how incredibly useful they have been at stemming the greed of the phone companies [especially the mobile ones], gas and electricity companies, bus companies, and in England, the water companies.  


Up until now Lansley has promised that care will remain, as it has been for 60 years, free at the point of delivery.


But today we discover this story about a walk-in centre operated for NHS Sheffield by One Medicare on a contact until 2016, where they charge patients £25 for treatments for whiplash.


Now, that's not free at the point of delivery by anyone's standards? And is whiplash the thin end of the wedge? If so what's next?

Of course it is nothing to do with us in Scotland. Fortunately our NHS, although far from perfect, is in the hands of the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Nicola Sturgeon and safe from being sold off.


But what does worry me a little is that in the vote in the Commons on the English NHS, I am told that 37  SCOTTISH Labour MPs voted with the Tory/Liberal government.


I'm not sure what they were doing voting on an all-English matter, but, that aside, if 37 Scottish MPs voted for a semi-privatised NHS, I must assume that the policy of Scottish Labour is to sell off the health service. Why otherwise would they support it in England?


Anyone who is not extremely rich or incredibly healthy and contemplating voting Labour in the future would do well to find out for certain what their intentions are for the future of the NHS. Their life might depend upon it.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD NEWS, JUST MOST OF IT...

In the news today I noticed so many things that make living in Britain today what it is...a pain in the ass.

First story to catch my eye was about the committee of MPs who have looked at government plans for the railways, which will, at least in part, affect Scotland (not that we have that many trains). The findings are that trains will become more crowded, more expensive and that there will be fewer of them. Just what we wanted to encourage us out of our cars and on to the public transport.


An early day motion from MPs has noted that the cuts to funding the railways will "worsen passenger services through the loss of thousands of frontline workers from trains, stations, ticket offices, safety-critical infrastructure and operational roles", and "will result in higher fares, cuts in services and more crowded trains". So good news for us then!


Then I noticed that while the rest of the country's workers are getting rises of around 1%, the FTSE chief executives, most of whose companies have lost a vast amount in the past few years, are hauling in rises of around 11%. With inflation at around 4-5% (at least officially), they seem to do rather well out of their failure.

The next story that I read won't affect me personally, but it will affect friends of mine. It is that the cabinet of the UK government, operating as the English government (and therefore I hope that Scottish MPs didn't vote), have decided that they will NOT publish the risk assessments involved in their semi-privatization plans for the English Health Service. 


Lansley's excuse for the veto, after a 19 month campaign by the public to be told, is something to do with allowing officials to give ministers candid opinions, but of course the real reason is that in making vast amounts of money for the companies that will bid for this business, there are going to be huge risks to people's health. When cutting a corner can result in turning in a bit better profit, let's not be in much doubt as to which the private sector will chose. God help the poor English under the Tories. Still, I imagine it will cut the number of people making it to pension age. So that should please them.


It was depressing reading about the incompetence and insensitivity of the DWP writing to families with disabled children warning them that their benefit would be reduced, when it won't.... and I was about to give up on the news when I saw a few cracking good laugh stories...

It seems that Dave and Nick decided to relaunch the coalition today. And they chose as their theme, the economy... you know...creating more jobs and that sort of stuff... unfortunately they chose to do it in a company which is outsourcing jobs to China, from whence executives had to rush in order to meet up with the prime ministers. Nobs or what?


And then there was yet another community leader saying that the good old Big Society, better known by most of us as BS, was a complete shambles. And this was reportedly the reason that Cameron came into politics. Struth, don't you wish he'd not bothered.


So it wasn't all doom and gloom after all.

SOME

For some strange reason an English Energy minister blokey called Charles Hendry, who is a Sussex MP, made a speech in Edinburgh, telling us that we are too wee, too stupid and too poor to manage to develop our own renewable energy business. We will need English investment to get it up and running, and English customers to buy the electricity. So he's yet another minister who thinks that, when Scotland becomes independent no one will want to invest in it. Idiot. Has he heard that his own prime minister has just signed up with the French to build nuclear power stations in England? That will be the FRENCH... Does he know anything about cross border co-operation? Our own Energy Minister, Fergus Ewing, has dismissed his claims. Quite right too. I hope we're not going to get a succession of these people coming up to visit porridge factories and telling us how useless we are. No, upon reflection I hope we are.


*****

Lansley, the English health minister was heckled as he made his way into Downing Street for the summit on England's NHS...well, the summit with the few parts of the organisation that are actually not against his proposals. He was called a liar and the words "shame" and "traitor" could be heard. I hope poor old Lansley has set up himself something for the future, because I can't see cabinet minister being a long term career for him. That said, the way that Cameron has made it clear he will push the health bill through, no matter what, it could be that it will be the end of both of them. Oh well, any number of cheesy PR men around. They will be easily replaced.


*****

Talking of health, it seems that Mark Simmonds MP has been obliged to apologising for forgetting, when making a speech in favour of the health reforms, that he is paid £50,000 a year as an advisor to Circle Healthcare, one of the companies that may bid for contracts in the wake of said reforms. It's easily done; £50,000 is such a piddling little sum that one is unlikely to recall it, just like maybe someone on JSA would forget that they got £10 for cutting the neighbour's lawn...only different clearly, in that Mr Simmonds is an important person who will get away with this, whereas...


*****
The government in London is calling up reservists to help police the Olympic games in July, August of this year. They have doubled the security budget to over half a billion of our money...well, of money borrowed from some place and now more than 13,000 military staff will be involved in protecting the games. Good use of money at a time when we are penniless, don't you think?


*****

PLEASE NOTE: ANDREW LANSLEY IS THE ENGLISH HEALTH SECRETARY

Andrew Lansley has been in the news today, in the morning because he was going to the Royal College of Nursing conference this afternoon to talk to a select few nurses, and there was to be a motion of no confidence.

Later in the day he was news because he’d been to the conference, there had been a motion of no confidence which was carried by a margin of 99-1, and he’d met some nurses, and told them he regretted that the message he had for them had failed to communicate itself (whatever that means).

Now it’s a given that Lansley is a toast in the making, shortly to be hung out to dry along with his policies (to mix my metaphors). That he was patronising to the nurses also goes without saying. He probably doesn’t know how NOT to be patronising.

But surprisingly it is not with him that I have an issue. No. Rather it is with the media.

The BBC this morning, STV at 6.30 and Channel 4 at 7 pm all made the same mistake. They talked of Lansley as The Health Secretary, and of the NHS as if the UK only had one.

Now, of course, we are all used to the fact that national news programmes treat Scotland as if it isn’t there most of the time.

That’s a given. But I beg of the tv and radio stations, not to mention newspapers to take heed of my plea..

This is election time in Scotland, I SAY THIS IS ELECTION TIME IN SCOTLAND... and we are electing a GOVERNMENT, just like you did last year, which will run our internal affairs.

Among these affairs is health. Your current misleading coverage may mean that some Scottish folk watching you programmes will think that our health service is just about to be semi privatised by a man so out of tune with everyone’s feelings you wonder that he’s not from Mars.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable if they did given today’s coverage. And come to that, the front page of yesterday’s SCOTTISH edition of the Daily Telegraph, which led with a story about the ENGLISH health service.

The truth is that under Nicola Sturgeon (Cabinet Secretary for Health) the Scottish Heath Service is getting better all the time.

Now the Daily Telegraph has no obligation to be fair and even handed so it’s just irritating that it’s not. The BBC, STV and Channel Four, however, have fairness as a contractual obligation. Perhaps at election times (even in far off, unimportant, little Scotlandshire) they might make a little more effort to ensure that their stories are as near the truth as they can reasonably be.

WHITHER THE HEALTH SERVICES IN THE UK?

I was speaking to my GP last week, and she mentioned the English Health Service reforms, saying that all her practice colleagues were hoping that they would never come to Scotland. I feel the same way. I want her doctoring, not managing, and even more so now that she told me she was pretty useless at admin, but I know she’s a smart cookie when it comes to healing.

It seems that many people in England feel the same way about the English health secretary Andrew Lansley's plans. His scheme has united doctors, health think tanks (and the right-of-centre think tank Civitas), unions representing the 1.4m-strong NHS workforce, health academics, MPs on the health select committee, the NHS's major employers, and patients' representatives in opposition.

Even David Cameron's brother-in-law, an NHS cardiologist, thinks the government has got it wrong, but predictably Mr Lansley and Mr Cameron intend to press on regardless, certain as they are, that they know best.

I’d be interested in finding out what other people think about this, particularly if you are English and are going to have to live or die by the totally new NHS that will emerge, and in any case, is this the right time to start messing about with something that will certainly cost a vast amount of money to set up?

But also if you are Scottish. The NHS has been carefully protected by the current government in Scotland. Is this a good thing? Do you think that it is fit for purpose in the 21st century, or has this government ignored the facts, as explained by Cameron, that in its current state, the NHS will simply not be able to survive? What do Scottish Tories think about their English colleagues' plans? And if you are Welsh or Irish, what kind of NHS do you have, and should it change?

These are extremely important issues for the whole of the UK, lives being dependent upon them. I have no idea what Labour’s proposals would be for the Health Service, but I feel that this will be an important issue in the debates leading to our General Election.

.....

HOW DID THE LABOUR PARTY LAY ITS HANDS ON PRIVATE NHS ENGLAND ADDRESSES?

“We are a group of clinicians, staff and campaigners working in and with the NHS. Every day, every week, we see first-hand the quality of care which the NHS gives to patients when they need it most. At this election we are backing Labour as the party of the NHS which will do the most to improve it for all patients.


“There is more to do to improve the NHS, but it is this Labour Government which has shown commitment to the NHS by investing in more doctors, nurses, more services and new hospitals and GP practices. It is Labour who are making the tough decisions that will allow our NHS to be protected in the future from spending cuts which would harm patient care. And only Labour are prepared to put patients first, for example with guarantees to rapid access to cancer specialists and cancer tests.


“For these reasons we believe only Labour can be trusted to protect and improve our NHS at this election."

This is a copy of an email petition (brought to my attention by Dubbieside. Thank you DS), which was sent by a Development Officer of the Labour Party, Amy Fowler, to GPs’ work e-addresses, which as they are internal NHS addresses, are not publicly available.

The petition, once signed, was expected to be sent to a newspaper, to show that members of the medical profession (presumably in England), were backing Labour.

[Obviously the only way that either the Tories or Labour can hope to affect our health service in Scotland is to change the amount of money that they generously give us to run Scotland. Even in this case, there is no way of knowing where a Scottish Government of any stripe would cut their cloth.]

Some of the clinicians, who are worried about how the Labour Party, as opposed to the government, got hold of private email addresses, are concerned that they may be blacklisted if they do not comply and sign the petition.

The Shadow Health Secretary, said: “The Labour Party need to explain how they have received these NHS e-mail addresses. If they are using the NHS private e-mail system to reach NHS staff for party political campaigning it is an abuse.” (It’s a pity he spoiled that reasonable call, by adding some unsubstantiated drivel about health care staff backing the Tories!)

Well, Labour seemed to be perfectly happy to (allegedly) use private patient information regarding people suffering from cancer for their party’s benefit, why would they not use private addresses and blacklisting?

Amy Fowler or her boss needs to do some explaining.

Pictured: Andrew Lansley Shadow English Health Spokesman; Nichola Sturgeon, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Health and Deputy First Minister