The NHS: The Beginning Of The End?

A & E departments across the country are so hard pushed that they have little choice but to declare a major incident and introduce emergency measures in order to cope. Doctors and nurses are at breaking point, patients are waiting up to five hours outside hospitals in ambulances and the government is failing to reach even its own pathetic targets. The crisis facing the NHS this winter is unprecedented and is the culmination of five years of Tory ideology which has inflicted untold damage on the service and brought it to the brink of extinction. So what have the Tories got to say about all this? Nothing intelligible. Cameron has accused anyone asking questions about this mess of "using the NHS as a political football" - as if he hasn't. He has also accused sick people of clogging up the system by having the sheer nerve to be sick and old people having the sheer nerve to be old. Not one word about the disastrous top-down re-organisation that he, Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt have pursued for the last five years. Not one word about the cuts to spending on the NHS over the last five years. Not one word about the destruction of morale amongst NHS employees over the last five years. Not one word about the destruction of those ancillary services that support the health care system and have now left the NHS exposed. Just more of the favoured Tory trick of blaming the victims. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the commitment of the Tory party to their core principle of killing people for money. The cuts inflicted on the NHS are designed to provide tax cuts for the Tories and their rich mates. The so-called re-organisation is designed to allow the Tories and their rich mates to get their hands on billions in assets that are actually the property of you and me - the tax payer. This is what Tory ideology means on the ground - more money for them and more misery for the rest of us.

Tories Still Scrounging.

Rural Tory councils have managed to persuade Eric Pickles that, unlike Labour held city councils, they should escape from many of the cuts to their budgets. This was achieved, sources have suggested, because the Tory Councils were threatening a Judicial Review. However, this fails to answer why the Tories couldn't give a toss about Labour councils doing the same. The real answer is that the Tories are scroungers of legendary ability and are able to get their grubby little hands on money denied to the rest of us with ease. Like all really good scroungers they are also adept at providing thmeselves with alibis for their money-grubbing. The official line was delivered by Andrew Lansley, Liar-In-Chief for the Smug Tendency in the Tory party; “Ministers agree that the evidence shows that rural areas are comparatively underfunded, and that a correction should be applied so that there is proper recognition of the additional costs of delivering services in rural areas.” Naturally the "evidence" remains unpublished while the average wealth of those living in rural Tory council areas goes completely and conveniently unremarked. What is abundantly clear is that we are no longer "all in this together" - not that we ever were - and that the Tory party has now taken to rewarding itself for voting Tory - not that it ever did anything else.

Tories "Listen" With Both Fingers In Their Ears.

Ian Duncan Smith, a man who waves his Christianity around like a flasher waves around his private bits, has this week revealed his attitude to ordinary people in no uncertain terms. Appearing on "Question Time" his reaction when the number of people he's responsible for killing was put to him by Owen Jones was as you'd expect - he shouted him down. Essentially his answer was "I don't care who dies as long as I get my way." Then it was revealed that he snubbed a 13 year old child, Kieran McArdle, who wrote to him about his recently deceased father. The boy's dad had suffered a devestating stroke that had left his paralysed down his left side and blind in one eye. Despite this his disability benefits were stopped after he was found "fit for work". He died the next day. And Ian Duncan Smith's reply to the boy? He told him that is he had any questions he should ask his local Jobcentre. Now it has emerged that such wilfull ignorance is not restricted to IDS alone but is a deliberate policy of the Tory party. Leaked documents show quite conclusively that Cameron's NHS "listening exercise" was little more than a cynical ploy to take the heat out of the debate while the PM and Andrew Lansley conspired with lobbyists to get privatisation through the backdoor. The lesson is clear and that is you cannot talk to this bunch of spivs and conmen since their reply is always the same - "talk to the hand becuase the face ain't listening."

NHS Privatisation Kills Two And Blinds Six.

Lister Hospital in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, is run by a private company, Carillion, which is in fact a construction company that knows nothing about healthcare but knows everything about cutting overheads, grabbing as much cash as it can and avoiding tax. So far this hospital - essentially a private business masquerading under the title of the "NHS" - has killed two people and blinded another six. In addition the East and North Hertfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group has also revealed that there have been "21 serious incidents of both a clinical and patient information governance nature", not to mention the 8,500 patient records that they have carelessly mislaid. A spokesman for the hospital, Dr Mark O'Flynn, has described the deaths as "unfortunate" but has so far failed to explain why two people should die after routine proceadures. Of course the answer is glaringly obvious. Staff numbers and quality have been cut by Carillion to reduce overheads so that they can divert taxpayers money from healthcare and into their very deep pockets. This is the essence of privatisation of the NHS - a gratuitous diversion of our money into the hands of greedy company executives and shareholders for the sake of a Tory ideology that claims that private companies will always be more "efficient". Of course the Tories are right, private companies will always be more efficient at stealing taxpayers money than nationalised services. These people have been killed - murdered if you will - by the likes of Andrew Lansley, Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron out of the oldest motive in the world - greed.

Lansley Steals £7.5 Million From The NHS.

The map pictured above shows the progress made by Lansley's privatisation of the NHS so far. Great swathes of the country are already in the hands of corporate healthcare bloodsuckers and more areas are soon to follow suit. Andrew Lansley is stealing the NHS from its real owners, you and me, and handing it over to his rich pals in the full and certain expectation that they will show their gratitude by increasing their "donations" to the Tory party. This is nothing better then fraud, the more so because the Tories have no mandate for this and directly lied to the electorate about it before the election. Worse still, Lansley has wasted £7.5 million of our money in the form of various "management" fees while he has deliberately starved hospitals of money in order to force them into bankruptcy. There are two methods by which this wholesale theft of a national asset can be halted. Both David Cameron and Andrew Lansley should be told in no uncertain terms that they will face criminal charges for this act of theft and all those corporations who are in receipt of what are actually stolen goods will have them taken off them with no compensation. Iceland has shown us the rest of the world what can be achieved when the public stand up for themselves and imprison the people who would steal entire countries for their own personal ends.

Lansley Continues Campaign To Soften Up The NHS.

Andrew Lansley continued his campaign of softening up the NHS for privatisation by lying through his teeth at the Royal College of Nursing's annual congress. Hr trotted out the usual rubbish about "listening" to NHS professionals but his body language showed clearly that he wasn't listening and had no intention of doing so. Then he claimed that front line staff had actually increased during his ministry, prompting one member of the audience to shout out "Liar!" It was clear, by this stage, that Lansley wasn't actually talking to the congress but to the cameras hoping that his soundbite approach would bury the facts. But the truth cannot so easily be hidden. Lansley is deliberately undermining the NHS, destroying morale and preventing it from working as it should in a shabby attempt to retrospectively excuse his privatisation plan. He is wrecking it with malice aforethought, softening it up for the corporate vultures lining up to bribe the Tory party as their reward for this piece of criminal assett stripping.

Simon Burns In Breathtaking Hypocrisy.

As the NHS is squeezed, hospital beds are reduced, staff continue to shrink in numbers and overheads are cut to prepare for privatisation, the number of patients being treated in corridors and on trollies is climbing steadily. This demostrates quite clearly to any intelligent human being that the Tory reforms consist almost entirely of making things worse. Hardly surprising considering this is what Tories do best. However, the reaction of Simon Burns, the lesser known but even more evil twin of Andrew Lansley, is nothing short of breathtaking. "There is no excuse for patients to be left waiting on trolleys. The NHS has beds free and available, and hospitals should be supporting their nurses to ensure that patients are admitted to them quickly. We will not hesitate to take action where we find hospitals failing to do so." He's absolutely right, of course, there is no excuse and he and Andrew Lansley are to blame. To try and pass this on to NHS staff is monstrous, but is understandable when you realise that Tory tactics are to undermine public confidence in the NHS in order to pave the way for further privatisation. He and Lansley are intent on stealing this national assett and flogging it off cheap to their corporate mates who are queuing up to press money into their hot and sweaty hands. It is an act of sheer criminality.

Lansley Pours Salt Into The Wounds.

Andrew Lansley, having effectively privatised the NHS, is now preparing to end national pay scales for NHS staff and force many of them to accept lower pay if they happen to live in "poorer neighbourhoods" (i.e. the North). Apart from a blatant attempt to set the North-South divide in concrete and pauperise those who don't vote Tory, this is simply another example of Lansley slicing up the NHS to make it easier for corporate vultures to gobble it down. It is also hard not to conclude that he is also provoking NHS workers into strike action, something that the Tories failed to do with regards to petrol tanker drivers, so that he can point the finger and label all NHS healthcare workers as irresponsible "reds" under the influence of evil trade unionists. The Tories are spoiling for a fight believing that they can recreate to halcyon days of the 1980's when they persuaded the whole country to cut its own collective throat. That a political party in this country would deliberately seek out such a confrontation for narrow political point-scoring demonstrates that they are not fit to govern. We've stood by and watched this gang of criminals steal our NHS are we now going to stand by as they stand on the necks of those who dedicate their lives to caring for others?