Will the big three parties 'step aside' now please

As there now appears to be a new convention in public life in the shape of “stepping aside” while inquiries take place into incompetence and/or misleading broadcasts by the BBC, surely there are grounds for extending this practice into political circles as well.

So in the interests of probity, here is a short, sample list of malpractice and/or lying at Westminster that should, if we lived in a real democracy, lead to all the big three political parties “stepping aside” for the foreseeable future.

     New Labour years

1. Claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and using this lie as the basis of an illegal invasion and occupation of that country. The hundreds of thousands of deaths that followed are the direct consequence of this action and prosecutions for war crimes are in order.
2. The introduction for the first time in 1998 of university tuition fees on the spurious ground that this was the only possible way to continue to the sector. It signalled the end of free higher education.
3. Creation of the light-touch regulation of the City and finance through the hopeless Financial Services Authority, thus misleading the public into believing their money was safe in the hands of the banks. The financial collapse of 2007 showed this to be a lie.
4. Expansion of “public finance initiative” projects to build hospitals and schools on the basis that they would save taxpayers’ money in the long term. The recent collapse of several NHS Trusts shows this to have been deception on a grand scale.
5. Claiming that the expansion of the global market economy would benefit everyone. In fact, inequality grew faster, executive salaries soared and the ownership of wealth became more concentrated in fewer hands.
6. Using the spurious “war on terror” as the cover for a war on civil liberties and human rights through detention without trial, integrated national databases, interception of emails and the merging of criminal and civil laws through the notorious ASBO system.

2010 election and the ConDems

7. In the run-up to the 2010 general election, the three major parties consistently refused to divulge their plans to cut public spending if elected. As a result, the election was a massive fraud perpetrated on the electorate as a whole. The Coalition came to power without a mandate in a constitutional coup.
8. The claim that “we are all in it together” made by the ConDems has proved to be one of the greatest lies of British history. Spending and welfare cuts, inflation, the rise in VAT and other measures have fallen disproportionately on average earners, those in need and people with disabilities. The rich, as per usual, have got richer.
9. Lib Dems propping up the Tories by breaking their election pledge not to support a rise in tuition fees. Vince Cable, the business secretary, proposed the increase in fees to at least £6,000 a year. This alone disqualifies the Lib Dems from ever being in government again!
10.  David Cameron’s pledge that the health service was “safe in his hands” has become one of the all-time political lies. The NHS Act opens the door to privatisation by making hospital trusts ever-reliant on fee-paying patients and allowing GPs to commission services from the private sector.

We could go on and on, but no doubt you have your own examples of how the political system has become a conduit for misleading, misinforming and lying. There’s only solution – and that’s for the perpetrators to step aside.

Unfortunately, they intend to cling on to office for as long as possible. So it’s going to take one big shove to get them out of our hair to make room for a real democracy to take shape.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Taking the knife to the NHS

The future fate of public services, whoever comes out on top in the general election, is already taking shape in the National Health Service. Cuts thinly disguised as “efficiency savings” are biting already but they are only the prelude to major reductions in spending and the provision of healthcare.

What’s actually happening now is typified by the situation in Basingstoke, where the hospital has already having to cut £6 million, or about 4% of its budget. Alex Whitfield, the associate director of productivity at the hospital NHS trust, admitted: “The financial situation is like nothing we have seen before. We have never had less money than the year before. We have a mountain to climb – it is huge.”

Cost-cutting projects include sending matrons back on occasional ward duty and using prescribed drugs left unused by discharged patients. Ultimately, Whitfield admitted, staff numbers will have to be reduced. Basingstoke’s problems flow from the decision by Sir David Nicholson, head of the NHS, to save £20 billion in three years in response to government pressure. Some estimates suggest that a third of hospitals will run out of money by the autumn of 2011, which New Labour is keen to disguise as the election date looms.

The crisis is already hitting primary care trusts, which “commission” operations and services from hospitals. A recent survey showed they are overspent by £130 million this year and will have to reduce spending in 2010-11 as a result. The funding gap has already had an impact on patients, with GPs in Hertfordshire being told to get "approval" for a list of procedures including hysterectomies, removal of "skin lumps and bumps" and tooth extraction. Managers have advised the family doctors that in many cases "it is usually better to wait to see if symptoms resolve themselves".

In London, campaigners say spending cuts being drawn up in secret threaten services such as casualty and maternity units at 13 out of 36 hospitals in the capital. A recent analysis by the British Medical Association warned: “This survey of London’s NHS raises serious questions about the long term viability of many of the capital’s acute hospitals in a complex and contradictory market. For the hospitals, the challenge is to juggle a whole series of pressures in the context of a frozen – but in real terms reducing – budget.”

Naturally, the plans are being kept under wraps as far as possible until after the election, although local campaigns are already under way. Some New Labour ministers have felt compelled to support protests as they seek to defend their seats. David Lammy, the Higher Education minister, for example, was on a recent march to save the Whittington Hospital casualty department in north London threatened by his own government’s policies! Hypocrisy or what?

Even before the cuts, health inequality is rising, with life expectancy for poorer households on average seven years lower than those on higher incomes, according to a recent report which declared: “In England, the many people who are currently dying prematurely each year as a result of health inequalities would otherwise have enjoyed, in total, between 1.3 and 2.5 million extra years of life.”

Halting the cuts in NHS spending and in other areas is urgent if these inequalities are not to grow even sharper. As a start we should reject the idea advocated by all the major parties that the national budget has to be “balanced” to appease financial markets. The markets cannot be allowed to blackmail society and should be told where to get off. And the same should apply to New Labour and the others as we get down to devising some serious revolutionary solutions.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor