Rosemary Sales, Hackney North CLP and Hackney Coalition to Save the NHS, argues that the fight is not over.

The Health and Social Care Bill may have been forced through by the time you read this, but campaigners will be continuing the struggle to defend our health service from privatisation and to fight to repeal the Bill.

The Bill threatens the existence of the NHS as a free, universal public health system. It opens up GP surgeries and hospitals to competition from private companies, bringing profit-making into the heart of our health care. The inevitable result will be widening inequalities and charging for services which are currently provided free.

The reorganisation has already cost millions of pounds, with doctors forced to spend less time with patients as they grapple with the bureaucratic structures introduced in the Bill.

The Bill has no democratic mandate – the Tories explicitly ruled out any “top down” reorganisation during the election campaign – and is opposed by most health professionals, even though they are central to the Bill’s implementation. Even the Tories’ coalition partners, the Libe-Dems, have voted against it – though most of their MPs are likely to ignore this vote. Andy Burnham, Labour’s Health spokesperson, has led an energetic campaign against the Bill and has pledged to repeal it in government.

In Hackney, the Coalition to Save the NHS was formed last year and involved doctors, other health workers, Labour Party activists and patients. We have received an overwhelming positive response from local people at our street stalls, public meetings and demonstrations. A public meeting on 29th March in Stamford Hill, led by local GPs, will set out a range of actions we can take to resist privatisation, whether or not the Bill is passed, including the following.

• Support the national march called by the Coalition of Resistance for mid June on the theme “Stop the cuts, Save the NHS”. This will involve major trade unions and should be the biggest march since the anti-cuts demonstration last March.
• Ask politicians to sign a commitment to campaign to repeal the Bill.
• Collect information locally on the adverse effects of the Health & Social Care Bill and help build a national picture through organisations such as False Economy (www.falseeconomy.org.uk/).
• Ask patients to talk to their GPs about the impact of the Bill and work with them through local Health and Wellbeing Boards to oppose privatisation.
• For more information visit This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and Keep Our NHS Public (www.keepournhspublic.com).

Glyn Tudor reports: The breadth of opposition to the Government’s so-called reforms to the NHS was reflected in the wide list of organisations represented at a meeting in Southampton organised by local MP, John Denham on 1st March.

The trade union viewpoint was put by officers from Unite, UNISON and the GMB, while health professionals from the BMA, RCN and the Royal College of Midwives felt strongly enough to join the platform too.

Rachel Maskell, Unite’s National Officer for Health, encapsulated the mood of the meeting when she said that the Government’s real objective was to privatise the NHS and that the treatment of a rising number of private patients would mean that NHS patients would be relegated to the “back of the queue.”
Dr Alex Freeman, a Southampton GP and BMA Council member, pointed out that the increased role of private companies in the NHS would result in greater fragmentation of the service.

Undoubtedly, the Coalition is on the back foot on this issue – even Tory Ministers are privately concerned.  It is heartening that Labour is at last actively campaigning on this and building alliances with the unions and other organisations.  This is surely a strategy which could be adopted in fighting other reactionary policies peddled by the Coalition Government.  In the short time that is left to prevent these disastrous measures, the movement needs to mobilise public opinion through the lobbying of Tory and Lib-Dem MPs and spell out the consequences should they act as voting fodder.

Linda Burnip, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), describes how the education system doesn’t deliver for disabled people.

The Con-Dem cuts and privatisation of our education system are destroying the lives of disabled children and young disabled adults, leading to further segregation in schools and preventing young adults going to university.

Imagine if you were told tomorrow that, from now on, all Black and Minority Ethnic children would be taught in segregated schools. You would no doubt be rightly outraged at the mere idea. Yet many think that for disabled children to be segregated in different schools is completely acceptable as that is all they have ever known.

Inclusive education in mainstream schools should be a legal right for every disabled child. Without this, society is unlikely ever to be fully inclusive. Disabled children may have a range of extra support needs, but they don’t come from another planet – nor do they need to be kept away from non-disabled children or teachers.
Inclusive education would require a radical rethinking of changes to the curriculum, exam structures and teaching methods, but the Alliance for Inclusive Education (ALLFIE) has examples of how schools which are already fully inclusive are successfully managing such changes.

Even where mainstream education is an option, which school a disabled child can go to is often restricted as school buildings remain inaccessible. Many local authorities only have one secondary school in each area which is accessible. For any child who is deaf or blind, the only provision available often forces them to move away from their homes and families to special residential schools. Effectively they are punished for being disabled by being denied a right to a family life.

The move towards increasing numbers of academies and free schools means that while schools remain exam factories, disabled pupils constitute a major threat to their perceived statistical superiority (as expressed by the league tables) – another reason why disabled children are excluded from mainstream education. Taken together with the reduction in funding from local authorities for support staff in schools, inclusive education is moving rapidly backwards and becoming less and less of an available option.

Abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance has plunged many families with disabled children further into poverty, and this excludes young disabled adults from staying on at school or college and having an opportunity to go to university. Like all young people, they are now facing massively increased tuition fees.

For young disabled adults with high support needs who want to go to university, getting the care and support funding they need can be complex. It often comes from four separate sources, with four separate assessments: health; social services; student finance; and until recently from the Independent Living Fund (ILF) too.

The funding from health and social services tends to be focussed on keeping you alive and clean and the essential bit of care and support funding that allowed disabled people to be part of society was provided by ILF funding. Since this has been closed to any new applicants after 2010, young disabled people are being denied the right to go to college and university as they cannot get enough money to fund their care needs. Funding for an extra room needed in halls of residence, if they need 24 hour live-in support, is also difficult to get and rarely covers the full cost of renting two rooms in halls.

Deaf students are excluded from socialising in higher education settings as, although they may have interpreters provided for lectures through the Disabled Students’ Allowance, these are not funded outside of that narrow setting.

• For more information, visit www.dpac.uk.net, www.allfie.org.uk.

Eileen Shorts reports: Tenants’ security, rents, benefits and the principles of non-market housing for rent are under an all-out assault. Homeless applications, overcrowding, rip-off and unsafe private lets and rough sleeping are all rising. Government policies to remove secure tenancies, drive up rents, cut housing benefits and push more into private renting are already making things worse.  Now thousands of families may be forced out of their homes and communities due to vicious benefit cuts.

Housing Emergency – an alliance of public and private tenants, unions, housing campaigners and organisations – launched the Time for an Alternative campaign at a packed House of Commons meeting on 21st February.

Ken Livingstone, film maker Ken Loach, Len McCluskey of Unite, Caroline Lucas and other MPs and the National Private Tenant organisation, are among those who have added their names to an open statement (see box, right). Shelter and Crisis joined Owen Jones, Councillor Catherine West (Leader, Islington council), Gail Cartmail of Unite, Austin Mitchell MP, Stephen Battersby, Ken Loach and Defend Council Housing at the launch.

Further meetings are being held around the country to galvanise action, including Leeds,  Cambridge, Harlow (29th March) and Tower Hamlets (14th April), with others planned in Bolsover, Sheffield, Southampton, York and more. Contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for details or to help organise a meeting.

We are pressing local councils not to use the “optional” powers to impose fixed term tenancies or up to 80% market rents – and to tell other landlords not to use these – in their role as Strategic Housing Authorities. This can be a starting focus for local campaigns to stop evictions and win the homes we need.

Housing Emergency is uniting with other groups to organise meetings and get out publicity on the streets, campaign and also take other action as needed against evictions. Tenants will protest outside the Housing Minister’s office in London on 28th March to demand investment in council and other housing for rent, with affordable rents and secure tenancies. This coincides with strikes by civil servants who support the campaign. We have a housing emergency: let’s have some emergency action to fight for a better deal!

John Cryer MP

The Government has used an obscure piece of legislation to force through an order which will lead to the construction of a large police station on Wanstead Flats, which happens to be in my constituency. The new station, we are told, will purely be for the duration of the London Olympics.

The Flats are common land, preserved as such by the Epping Forest Act of 1878, which followed decades of attempts by wealthy landowners to enclose the area. One could be more straightforward and say that the process of enclosure was actually theft from the people of this country.

Until a few years ago, the Government would have been forced to pass primary legislation to amend the 1878 Act. However, the relevant order only had to be passed by the Regulatory Reform Committee – created in 2006 by an Act of the same name – for ministers to get their way.

I persuaded the Committee to refer the order to the House of Commons so we could have a proper debate, but that is as far as I could get with my attempt to block it. This goes to the heart of a deeply worrying process that has been going on for decades.

Today, masses of important legislation gets passed by committees in Parliament, never really seeing the light of day. This is secondary legislation, generated by both Brussels and Whitehall. Accountability and scrutiny are often minimal, involving a brief debate by a handful of MPs in a committee room.

The regulatory reform process is just one route for secondary legislation. There are many others and the volume passing through Westminster has risen under every government since the 1970s.

This might sound a bit obscure, but the wards in Waltham Forest which are near the Flats are some of the poorest in London. Poor Londoners are being robbed, perhaps temporarily, of an ancient and much loved amenity, and it’s been done by the back door.

If that can happen, we should all be very concerned. Would the same happen in a wealthy area? I doubt it.