Poll: public against or unsure on NHS changes

by Sunny Hundal    
January 20, 2011 at 4:35 pm

A poll by YouGov on government plans to restructure the NHS has found a significantly percentage of people strongly opposed to the proposals.

A very high percentage of people “don’t know”, which means the level of opposition has the potential to rise sharply.

37% of Brits oppose the Government’s restructuring plans, with 16% strongly opposed.
34% support them, with just 5% strongly in favour.
30% said that they didn’t know what to think about the plans.

Even worse for the government, there is little faith in their ability to deliver.

57% of Brits say they do not trust the Government much or ‘at all’ to deliver on the NHS
Only 36% said they did (including 7% who do so strongly).

Comparisons
YouGov also found that:

32% of Brits felt that the NHS delivers ‘about the same level of care as the health services of most other countries in Europe’
29% felt that NHS healthcare was ‘better’ than that of other countries
Only 23% said that they thought the NHS was worse than elsewhere in Europe.

This is a massive mountain to climb for the government, and shows that most people are on side of people opposed to NHS changes.

Full details of poll here

Update: I mistakenly added up the wrong numbers to the poll earlier and inflated the number of people opposed. The graph has now been corrected.

Taxpayers’ Alliance caught misrepresenting stats to justify local cuts

by Guest    
January 20, 2011 at 3:34 pm

contribution by Tim Fenton

Secure in his non-job at the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), the smug Chris Daniel has joined the right-wing chorus of those demonising local authorities and their spending.

Daniel’s article, filled with needlessly pejorative terms and phrases, such as “Councils … gorging on taxpayers’ money” … “unsustainable growth”, “misspending”, and “bloated”, will be music to cheerleaders for the TPA and others who take its propaganda on trust.

But let’s have a look at their main claim shall we?
continue reading… »

How healthcare firms have funded the Tories

by Sunny Hundal    
January 20, 2011 at 12:45 pm

Yesterday the Daily Mirror revealed:

A Mirror investigation can today reveal private health firms set to cash in on Conservative plans to rip apart the NHS have poured a fortune into the party. The wealthy owners, who have made huge sums from the healthcare industry, have donated around £750,000 since David Cameron became leader.
…
Hedge fund boss John Nash is one of the major Conservative donors with close ties to the healthcare industry. He and wife Caroline gave £203,500 to the party over the past five years.

The cash included £21,000 which was given directly to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to bankroll his office before the Conservatives took power. At the time the Lib Dems slammed the payments as a “staggering conflict of interest”.
…
Nursing and care home tycoon Dolar Popat has given the Conservatives £209,000. The Ugandan-born dad-of-three has amassed an estimated £42million fortune as founder and chief of TLC Group, which provides services for the elderly. Mr Cameron made the businessman a peer shortly after entering No10 last May, and Lord Popat’s donations include a £25,000 gift registered a week after the Tories’ health reforms were unveiled last July.

IC Technology, which provides computer services to the NHS, has handed the Tories £70,000 over the past two years.

Philip Scott, chief of the Priory Group, has donated £20,000.

Balding Mr Cameron also got money from an up-market firm treating hair loss. The Trichological Clinic Limited, which operates out of Harrods, gave the Conservatives £10,000 last year.

(emphasis mine) and there’s more plenty more mentioned in that account.

SpinWatch have also released this video that takes you through some of Conservative party’s friends in the health industry.

Tamasin Cave from SpinWatch told Left Foot Forward yesterday:

As the film reveals, some of Lansley and David Cameron’s supporters have spoken of “denationalisation”, and called the NHS an “abhorrence”.

Kingsley Manning, business development director for health at Tribal (who are looking to get into the commissioning process) said in July last year:

This white paper could amount to the denationalisation of healthcare services in England and is the most important redirection of the NHS in more than a generation, going further than any Secretary of State has gone before.

Yesterday Channel 4′s Jon Snow asked Andrew Lansley about his links to private healthcare company, and he nothing satisfactory to say.

Minister apologises over benefit fraud claims

by Don Paskini    
January 20, 2011 at 11:43 am

Lord Freud, government minister for welfare reform, has written to the Methodist Church to apologise after an “inadvertent” error meant that a government report claimed that benefit fraud cost the taxpayer £5.2 billion.

An alliance of church leaders had written to complain about the way that government rhetoric stigmatises the poor, and specifically about inaccurate claims by government ministers – including George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith – that benefit fraud cost more than £5 billion.

Freud acknowledged that

the government recognises that the vast majority of benefit recipients are genuinely entitled to the financial support they receive

He also thanked them for

drawing my attention to the incidences, including in the Ministerial foreword to the strategy document, where the £5.2 billion has been quoted as representing fraud along instead of fraud and error…I apologise for the concern this has caused, and I have asked my officials to take corrective action.

Freud claims that he is satisfied that the numerous inaccuracies over the level of benefit fraud, for example in the Chancellor’s budget statement and in official welfare reform strategies, were “entirely inadvertent” and “not intended to mislead”.

It does, however, fit a pattern of DWP ministers making inaccurate claims to support their arguments, such as when Iain Duncan Smith claimed that statistics about housing benefit came from the Office of National Statistics, when in fact they came from a property website owned by the Daily Mail.

There are also “serious deficiencies” in the way that the DWP uses statistics.

Lord Freud states he has “asked his officials to take corrective action”. Has anyone heard public announcements correcting and explaining the figures? Have governmental websites been modified?

It is gracious indeed to recognise mistakes, it is however wiser to make amends.

Sunny adds: More importantly, why isn’t George Osborne apologising for this mistake and for misleading the House of Commons? He was also sharply criticised by Peter Oborne at the Telegraph over this issue.

But it seems Osborne doesn’t like saying sorry and has to get others to do it for him.

A significant ruling in the battle for libel reform

by Guest    
January 20, 2011 at 11:00 am

contribution by Gareth Winchester

On Tuesday the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) made an important ruling in MGN Ltd. v UK case.

It unanimously ruled that success fees in libel cases are excessive, and breach Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which relates to Freedom of Expression.
continue reading… »

Activists hit Defra to protest over forests sale

by Sunny Hundal    
January 20, 2011 at 10:00 am

Yesterday morning a group of activists from the environmental action group Climate Rush placed ‘FOR SALE’ labels on dumped trees they had found the evening before.

Dressed as Suffragettes with hand-sewn rabbit, mice and badger ears, the group delivered the trees to Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The government is currently planning to sell most or all of the publicly owned forests in England.

These forests have special protection in law, but the government wants to remove this protection giving them the freedom to sell all of the public forest estate.

In 2009 a public consultation generated an overwhelming response asking for the expansion of our public forest estate, not its disposal.

More pictures at the Climate Rush site

Is this the kind of society we want to live in?

by Guest    
January 20, 2011 at 9:06 am

contribution by Nathaniel Mathews

We all have come to expect free education, free healthcare, and benefits that will preserve a minimum standard of decency for the unemployed. But what sort of system do we have to protect people when these things fail?

I have worked as a solicitor in a London Law Centre for over 16 years. As such, I am a poor man’s lawyer. I’ve seen the best of people and I see the worst. But I don’t want to see this society that we are in danger of moving into.
continue reading… »

Met admits to lying about plain clothes police at G20 demo

by Sunny Hundal    
January 20, 2011 at 8:45 am

In May 2009, not long after the G20 protests where newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson had died, Met police commander Bob Broadhurst told MPs:

We had no plain-clothes officers deployed within the crowd. It would have been dangerous for them to put plain clothes officers in a crowd like that.

The only officers we deploy for intelligence purposes at public order are forward intelligence team officers who are wearing full police uniforms with a yellow jacket with blue shoulders. There were no plain clothes officers deployed at all.

Yesterday evening the Met quietly admitted he had lied.

In wake of the controversy around police spying of eco activists, Labour MP Keith Vaz wrote to the Met’s Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson.

Last night the Met issued this statement:

Having made thorough checks on the back of recent media reporting we have now established that covert officers were deployed during the G20 protests.

Therefore the information that was given by Commander Bob Broadhurst to the Home Affairs Select Committee saying that ‘We had no plain-clothes officers deployed within the crowd’ was not accurate…

The officers were covertly deployed by the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service) to G20 protests to identify individuals who may be involved in the organisation of criminal activity and to give live time intelligence/evidence as to the protesters’ activity.

Unbelievable. And you can bet no one at the Met will be reprimanded for this ‘inaccuracy’.

They keep denying however that “agents provocateurs” were operational at the event. Why should anyone believe that?

Bob Broadhurst has now been asked to come back before the Home Affairs Select Committee on January 25 to explain himself.

Today’s employment figures aren’t good, despite what Grayling says

by Richard Exell    
January 19, 2011 at 4:28 pm

Today’s labour market figures are pretty depressing – employment down, unemployment up.

But at first sight, one statistic looks encouraging: there were 480,000 vacancies in the three months to December. This is an increase of 18,000 from the three months to September and is fourteen thousand higher than a year earlier.
continue reading… »

Mail cartoon equates gay couples with Nazis

by Guest    
January 19, 2011 at 2:17 pm

contribution by Seph Brown

Today the Daily Mail predictably backed the right of business owners to discriminate against homosexual couples.

As horrific as it is, I am not shocked by their editorial line.

I am however confused and angered by the paper’s cartoon, satirising the event by depicting two burly, gay, neo-Nazi bikers attempting to enter a Christian hotel:

.

The full-sized cartoon is here.

I understand that you wouldn’t want a Nazi staying in your B&B, so are the Mail saying that gay couples are like Nazis?

As far as I am aware, unlike the decades of discimination against the LGBT community, the ‘oppressed Nazi’ is not a particulatly large or sympathetic minority group.

Maybe I’m just a humourless lefty, but I don’t get it.

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