Yuri Prasad | ukwatch.net

Gordon Brown's tough talk won't stop knives

JamieSW — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:37:37 +0000

It seems that in the last week the entire political establishment has jumped on the issue of knife crime.

Gordon Brown used his monthly press conference on Monday of this week to announce his new get-tough approach. There are to be tough “community payback” schemes, tough plans to deal with “problem families”, and tough curfews for the under-16s.

But beneath all this robust language it is clear that none of our politicians have a clue as to how to reduce the number of young people carrying knifes, only the vague hope that by talking tough they can prevent their political rivals from outflanking them.

Brown’s community payback scheme is one such example.

Here those convicted of carrying, but not using, a knife will be forced to undertake up to 300 hours of work over 50 days.

“Communities… should have a role in deciding what they should do,” says Brown. “Cleaning up parks or scrubbing graffiti, and what time they should do it, such as cleaning the streets on Friday and Saturday night.”

The overwhelming majority of young people who carry knifes do so out of an acute sense of fear that unless they are armed, they may become the next victim of a stabbing. Some are scared for their lives every time they leave their house.

Does Brown really believe that people in such a situation will be deterred by this scheme?

Is it the case that the very small number of people who have become so alienated from the society that they see little value in human life – neither theirs, nor anyone else’s – will now think twice before reaching for a blade?

Surely even New Labour knows this is rubbish.

Programmes

Brown is attempting to lay the blame for knife crime at the feet of the families of the 110,000 children he claims have been found guilty of anti-social behaviour.

“I think all of us recognise that the first responsibility where a child is in trouble or in danger of getting into trouble rests with the parent,” he argues.

Now up to 20,000 of those families could face “parenting action” programmes, and even removal to residential accommodation for retraining.

Those that refuse the scheme could find themselves evicted from social housing and their children taken into care.

How making families homeless, turfing their belongings out in the street, and then sending their kids to a care home will make the situation better is anyone’s guess.

Nevertheless the idea does have a specific ideological purpose. It says social problems in our communities are the result of personal and family failure, rather than being connected to any wider concerns.

If knife crime is the product of families that are out of control, then there need be no discussion of other issues, like the levels of exclusion from schools, unemployment rates, crap jobs and lack of apprenticeships. There need not be any understanding about the way many working class young people feel completely undervalued and under siege.

Above all it means that the state can absolve itself from any responsibility for providing real remedies to the situation.

By accepting such a right wing agenda on crime, Brown has given credibility to David Cameron’s talk of a “broken society”.

Failed

He has allowed the Tories to suggest that some problems may not stem only from failed individuals but from a society whose values have failed – an idea that can masquerade as both left and right wing.

But we cannot afford to allow the right to dominate the debate over crime.

Many people rightly feel that anti-social behaviour and violence grow when the idea of community is undermined. This notion of community rests on the idea that we are not just atomised individuals, but people capable of collective action.

Struggles to improve our estates, build community centres and challenge the way our education system is developing as a test factory have the potential to unite people in ways that no mainstream politician seems capable of.

But the success of such campaigns is dependent upon rejecting the idea that young people are the problem and that a crackdown is the answer.

Why is the National Union of Students planning a vote to abolish itself?

JamieSW — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:32:32 +0000

A key vote at next week’s annual conference of the National Union of Students (NUS) could see the organisation transformed from a campaigning body into a “professional lobbying group”.

Over 1,000 delegates will vote on whether to ratify a “governance review” that will abolish the union’s annual conference and national executive – replacing them with a congress that “celebrates the year” and a senate that will rarely meet.

This would leave power solely in the hands of full-time “professionals”.

The review is being promoted by NUS national executive members who describe themselves as “organised independents”.

It is also backed by the Labour Students organisation.

They believe that in order to influence government policy and future reviews of higher education funding, the NUS must drop its campaigning and become something more akin to a think-tank.

Many among the organised independents and Labour Students feel that demonstrations and protests are old fashioned and that they present “unrealistic demands” upon the government.

Unattainable

The NUS has even declared that the demand for free education is unattainable, and therefore must be dropped.

They argue that all that has to go in order for the NUS to be taken seriously by the heads of Britain’s universities and top politicians.

Conferences involving elected delegates and an executive that includes a few left activists are regarded as an obstacle to the transformation.

In case the proposed changes fail to put a stop to the left, the review will create a new NUS board empowered to veto any decision passed at the congress or senate that could “put the organisation in legal or financial peril”.

Though the board is supposed to be student-led, 40 percent of its members will be appointed rather than elected.

Some supporters of the review believe that these changes to the NUS’s structure are just the first step.

For them the final goal should be the eradication of politics from student unions, turning them into multi-million pound businesses.

The governance review will face opposition at NUS conference from those who are determined that the union should be transformed into an organisation that coordinates student struggles against rising tuition fees, racism and Islamophobia, the “war on terror” and climate change.

Reflection

“The stakes are incredibly high,” says Rob Owen, a Student Respect supporter on the NUS national executive.

“If these changes go through, the ability of student activists in colleges to have an impact on the policy of their union will be so curtailed that democracy will be almost non-existent in the NUS.”

Rob sees the attempt to change NUS as a reflection of the depoliticised way in which many local student unions are being run.

He says, “A student union should be a place where people can come together and find resources that will help them campaign, that informs and educates people, and is somewhere good to socialise.

“But many student unions are now just a commercial venture.

“In many ways the unions are travelling in the opposite direction to students themselves.

“Growing radicalism is leading to healthy activism on a lot of campuses – particularly in opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Where student unions attempt to situate themselves in that activism, they become popular and democratic institutions.

“In these places people think of the student union as ‘their’ union, not just a bar.”

The Market - a Mortal Threat to the NHS

eddie — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:02:46 +0000

_Politicians of all parties are keen to be seen as defenders of the NHS. But, argues Yuri Prasad, they all share the neoliberal policies that are causing the crisis._

The NHS is one of the most valued institutions in British society. But its very basis is under threat from the neoliberal policies that Gordon Brown’s New Labour government, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, subscribe to.

These policies lead to cuts and privatisation, and the desire to put profit over need is ripping the heart out of the NHS.

The cash crisis that has gripped the service for the last 18 months has seen a number of NHS trusts forced to make drastic decisions to close wards and freeze posts.

According to the Royal College of Nursing union more than 22,000 NHS jobs have been lost in the last 18 months.

The supposed “reconfiguration” of both accident and emergency provision and maternity services has been the focus of a huge outpouring of anger that reflects wider concerns about the deterioration of health services.

Threats to local hospitals and services have provoked enormous protest movements, and can move even the most loyal New Labour MP to join demonstrations that criticise the implications of government policy.

Unsurprisingly, mainstream political parties have fallen over themselves to proclaim their loyalty to the NHS.

In the face of the job losses and plans to downgrade dozens of hospitals, even the Tories launched an “NHS yes” campaign, and the Liberal Democrats an “NHS SOS” campaign.

The government responded with its own “Your NHS, better with Labour” campaign.

Yet all the main parties share the underlying assumptions that are leading to cuts.

They believe in the need for privatisation and an internal market in the NHS, and that the system cannot afford to provide universal healthcare in an era of new treatments and an ageing population.

Therefore, for them, some form of rationing of the system is required.

*Diverted*

Privatisation has had devastating consequences for the NHS. Every time a part of the service is subcontracted to the private sector, more of the service’s resources are diverted into shareholders’ profits.

Nevertheless the main parties remain committed to the operation of private firms in the NHS because they regard it as a means by which savings can be made.

For them, private equals efficient, and public equals inefficient.

Yet the criteria they use to measure efficiency is always that of the short term balance sheet. And they never take the experience of the patients and those who work in the service into account.

In 1991 the then Tory government introduced the internal market into the NHS as part of its drive to force competition between different hospitals.

It hoped that this would allow private firms to join in the provision of services.

*Opposed*

Labour strongly opposed the internal market at the time but has since expanded it massively, forcing a system of payment by results on everyone who provides services.

The cost of administering this market now accounts for more than 12 percent of the entire NHS budget.

Today the number of ways in which the NHS is being privatised is so great that it is difficult to list them all.

Private firms are now providing NHS services like GP surgeries and treatment clinics, and are increasingly looking to take over the commissioning of healthcare.

Private firms want the right to take over the running of primary care trusts that buy services, like community nursing, for their patients.

That could lead to them being both the buyers and providers of services in the NHS, leaving the NHS as nothing more than a badge to put on the service.

The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deserves a special reference because of the amount of damage that it continues to inflict on the NHS.

PFI is another Tory invention that has been greatly expanded under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Under PFI, private consortiums build and run hospitals that are then leased back to the NHS under contracts that often run for decades.

PFI was supposed to harness the “efficiency” of business for the benefit of the health service, but instead it has turned into a weight around the neck of health authorities.

Professor Jean Shaoul from the Manchester Business School has analysed the cost of building new hospitals under PFI.

She found that the first 12 hospitals that were built cost the NHS an extra £60 million a year – and the contracts are set to run for the next 30 years – because the cost of borrowing for the private sector is more than for the public sector.

She says, “For the 155 schemes worth £9 billion signed so far, the additional cost of private finance is £480 million a year. That sum would build several new hospitals every year.”

Today PFI payments account for almost 12 percent of each hospital’s income, which means that a significant proportion of the government’s much vaunted increase in health spending has been pocketed by a variety of private firms.

The widespread hostility to the privatisation of public services, particularly the NHS, has driven politicians of all stripes to attempt to camouflage their policies that encourage the market.

One such attempt is the creation of “social enterprises”, or a so-called “third sector”.

Social enterprises are profit-making bodies. They are often iniated by managers leaving the NHS or by voluntary sector bodies connected with healthcare.

Health visitors, nurses and social workers have all been encouraged by the government to set up social enterprises, and sell their services back to the NHS.

The government recently put up £73 million over four years to encourage the process. At the end of January, 26 “pathfinder projects” were announced. But these new organisations are forced to compete against private firms to offer their services in the NHS market.

*Competitors*

Therefore, just like their competitors, they need to have low costs and overheads in order to win the bidding wars.

This drive to cut costs has led many health campaigners and union activists to believe that the social enterprises that take over services will seek to cut experienced NHS staff, because they tend to be older and therefore more expensive to employ.

In particular, staff who are transferred out of the NHS are often rightly worried about their future pension arrangements.

And while many people will regard social enterprises in a similar way to charities, there are no legal restrictions on the way social enterprises divide their profits.

These new firms can become just as much a burden on the NHS as the private firms that they are competing with.

As with other forms of NHS competition, for every patient that is taken by private or social enterprise, one is lost to an in-house provider.

This means that eventually we will be told that the in-house provider has become unviable, and should be closed altogether.

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*RATIONING ISN'T RATIONAL*

The common sense of healthcare says that as more sophisticated medical technologies and medicines become available, and Britain’s population ages, the NHS’s original aim of providing free healthcare to all becomes impossible.

Many analysts point to the fact that there have been forms of health rationing in the service almost since its birth – starting with the introduction of prescriptions for medicines in 1951.

Today, health rationing takes the form of the denial of certain medicines and treatments from the list of those that can be provided by the NHS.

Alzheimer’s victims in England and Wales were dealt a blow in August when a high court judge upheld the decision by the drug rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), to stop supplying three new drugs, Aricept, Reminyl and Exelon, to certain people.

Nice ruled that only those with severe Alzheimer’s could have them. The drugs, which cost £2.50 per patient per day, can slow the disease.

NHS bosses have in many areas attempted to ration specific treatments that they believe to be non-essential, or optional.

This has included restricting access to fertility treatment.

The fact that some treatments are available on the NHS in some parts of the country, but not in others, has only served to heighten anger about the range of treatments that are being rationed.

In an effort to balance the books, many hospital trusts are setting up foundations that provide private healthcare to those who can afford it. The message being that if we have denied you NHS treatment, we can still help you… but you’ll have to pay.

The very cornerstone of the argument for rationing – that there is only so much to go round, and that needs to be fairly allocated – is false.

Britain still spends far less of its wealth on healthcare than other European countries.

In 2004 Britain spent 8.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare, while Germany spent 10.9 percent, and France, Belgium, Greece and Portugal all devoted 10 percent, or more.

The result is that while France, Germany and Spain all have 3.4 doctors per 1,000 of the population, Britain has just 2.3.

The number of CT scanners (imaging technology that produces a 3-D picture of your body) stood at seven per million of population in 2004, less than half the OECD block of European and North American countries’ average of 18. France, Germany, Italy and Spain all registered a higher life expectancy than Britain.

Rather than seeking to democratise rationing in the NHS, those who are committed to social justice ought to be fighting to raise the proportion of Britain’s wealth spent on health. And we should put an end to the great waste of privatisation.

Looking at the power of the trade unions, combined with the thousands who have demonstrated locally in defence of their local hospitals, provides a glimpse of the forces that could be mustered for such a battle.

Privatisation in the NHS

eddie — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:54:00 +0000

A government-backed review of NHS services in London last week could lead to wholesale closures of accident and emergency wards, doctor’s surgeries and a number of district general hospitals.

The report by professor Sir Ara Darz, who is now an unelected health minister in Gordon Brown’s government, states that its aim is to reduce the vast health inequalities that exist within London and between London and the rest of the country.

Much of the media have concentrated on the proposals to develop specialist centres that would treat people suffering from particular acute problems, like strokes, or cancer.

Potentially this could improve the care of people who currently suffer because of the lack of trained staff, equipment and hospital beds.

However by proposing the development of over 100 “polycentres”, which would combine a number of GP surgeries with a host of other functions, the report opens up a new range of services to private providers, and could lead to a worsening of services for millions of Londoners.

Without a massive injection of resources into recruiting and training new staff it is unlikely that people who, for example, require long term heart or lung care, would receive the kind of attention that they would expect in a borough-based district general hospital (DGH), or at their local GP’s surgery.

They would be expected to travel to their nearest polyclinic on a regular basis in order to be seen.

Closure

Implicit in the report is the closure of many district general hospitals. The internal market within the NHS – introduced by the Tories, and upheld by New Labour – means that every hospital operates on the basis of payment by results.

Darz’s plan would see more work diverted away from DGHs, meaning that they get less money in their budget for the following year. Within a short space of time we can expect that many London DGHs will be said to be “financially unviable”.

When it comes to GPs, at present a GP in London looks after an average of 2,200 patients. It is likely that your doctor’s surgery is within a mile of your home.

Under the new plans, however, just four polycentres per London borough will replace many smaller surgeries – each will have between 60,000 and 80,000 patients on its books.

That means those who do not have a car, and for whom travelling distances is not an easy option, will find getting to see their GP a lot more difficult than it is now.

The government’s enthusiasm for the private sector means that it is likely that the new buildings will paid for using the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), or some similar method.

It is also possible that the polycentres will become private bodies working under contract to the NHS, in the same way that Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs) are now.

A number of private companies are already rubbing their hands at the prospect of getting a bigger slice of the NHS.

The Financial Times newspaper enthusiastically greeted the report, saying, “The change would herald a big reshaping of the current NHS estate, which includes 93 hospital sites, more than 1,400 mental health and community facilities and almost 1,600 GP practices that collectively are worth many tens of billions of pounds.”

Polycentre

Much of the report concentrates on attempting to move care from the hospital to the polycentre, or the home.

Anyone who has been forced to spend time in hospital recently would doubtless agree that home is generally a more comfortable place to be. However, the moves are being driven by the desire to save cash, rather than improve patients’ quality of care.

Community nurses and other practitioners report that they are already overwhelmed by the number of patients that they are expected to see during the working week. Many believe that their patients are suffering as a result.

In response to the report the campaign group London Health Emergency called for a referendum next May, as part of the Greater London Assembly and London mayoral vote.

They point out that the NHS London plans mean nearly a third of the city’s 32 major acute units would be closed or downgraded and London would be left with just three major trauma centres.

Geoff Martin of London Health Emergency said, “The proposed changes are so far reaching that they cannot be allowed to proceed without a democratic vote of Londoners and next May’s capital-wide elections are the ideal time to put this to the people.

“Changes like these should not be left in the hands of a bunch of bureaucrats sitting at computers at the Department of Health or NHS London.”

Closure threats to many accident and emergency units in London, and across the country, have given rise to large scale opposition. As thousands joined marches to defend their local hospital, the government were forced to draw up a “heat map” that indicated where such movements could lose Labour seats at subsequent elections.

Gordon Brown and the health secretary Alan Johnston have talked about a year-long review of the health service. The NHS London report shows the direction they want to take the NHS – cuts, closures and privatisation.