New Labour’s Hall of Shame

It’s a safe bet that this is being written on the final day of the New Labour Project. If you’d told me, on 2^nd May 1997, that I’d be actively campaigning and longing for the defeat of a Labour Government, I’d have been horrified. Yes, I voted for them in ’97 and even in 2001 (though for the excellent Old Labour Alice Mahon, and there was no Green….) and therefore my sense of betrayal is almost unbearably strong.

 Books have been written, with many more to come I’m sure, about their multiple failings. Iraq looms largest – it got me and many others into the Green Party – and I’ve blogged at length on what will undoubtedly be the chief legacy of these 13 years.

 I want to move beyond that, to remind us all of the other betrayals. For anyone who is still toying with the idea that Labour are a real alternative to the Tories, let me give you a whistle-stop tour of why they are not:

• They broke their promise to renationalise the railways
• They broke their promise to introduce voting reform
• They introduced tuition fees and used the most despicable distortions to try to justify it
• They colluded in torture
• They’ve been intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, themselves most of all
• They locked people up in Belmarsh and refused to put them on trial -“We know he’s guilty, we just can’t prove it” For God’s sake, it needed the Tories to stop them destroying rights we’ve had since Magna Carta!
• They’ve encouraged businesses to sponsor their horrible ‘academies’
• They’ve done their best to sell off the profitable bits of the NHS .
• PFI

 I’ll finish with a genuine lament. This was all done by the party of Kier Hardie, Nye Bevan, Clement Attlee and Michael Foot. Don’t ask how or why – we already know. Dry your eyes, look for alternatives and whatever you do, don’t vote for them or the Conservatives tomorrow!

Nye Bevan’s Body

The last 24 hours has been all about the NHS. As regular readers of this blog know, I am a Speech and Language Therapist by profession, which means that I’ve spent most of my working life in the NHS. I am also a longtime defender of said NHS, despite its faults. I worry about how much there is left to defend, though…

 Last night there was a candidates’ debate, organised by the BMA, at our local hospital in Halifax. I already knew I was excluded from the platform (again) so I turned up with a colleague to hand out home-brewed leaflets. It did come as a shock, though, to find that I wasn’t even allowed into the audience for this one! Apparently there are BMA ‘rules’…

 Today I was out in the Todmorden sun, so I gave out some of the NHS flyers outside the big new PFI Health Centre. No sooner could you say “corporate profits” than a chap in a suit told me to remove myself because it was “private property”. I did as I was ordered, but I wondered when a local health centre became private property? The answer is… when New Labour took the bribes of big business in return for seats in their well-appointed boardrooms! From PFI to Foundation Hospitals to ISTCs, the last few years has seen a scandalous and underhand scramble to sell off whatever bits of health care were deemed profitable, while the NHS is left with all the difficult and unglamorous illnesses….

 As previously noted, our ‘main parties’ (who were squabbling on telly while I was outside the hospital) are all keeping schtum about this aspect of health policy. Could this possibly be because they all know they’re vulnerable on the issue? Imagine if Caroline Lucas had been allowed to take part in the TV debate – I think viewers might have learned a bit more about it. Don’t you? Let’s spare a thought for Nye Bevan (see Posthumous Green Award, Jan 17) who has presumably become centrifugal in his grave….

Posthumous Green Award

This week’s award goes to Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, who would be disgusted by what ‘his’ Labour colleagues are doing to the NHS. I firmly believe that he would have transferred his allegiance to the Greens by now