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| Only a little local affair |
You might have missed it yesterday, but some 50,000 people took
to the streets to protest about something.
If you did miss it, you can hardly be blamed: it might sound
like a newsworthy matter to you, but to the BBC and others, it was – at most –
just a little local affair.
The demonstration itself – which the local police force involved
went to some bother on social media of pointing out was the biggest it had ever
had to deal with and was entirely peaceful – was about what’s happening to the
National Health Service (NHS).
The protestors included not just patients, but those working in
the health service itself, from doctors and nurses to cleaners and porters.
In a nutshell, the protestors believe that it is being deprived
of funds and privatised by stealth using the inevitable consequences of that
reduction in funds as the excuse to bring in private companies to make private
profit from the service.
The process has been ongoing since the government came to office
in 2010. Before the election that year, the leader of the Conservative Party,
now Prime Minister David Cameron, sought to quash fears by stating both that:
“there will be no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS” and “I will cut the
deficit, not the NHS”.
On the former, this would have been welcome, after some years of
changes that seemed to come on a weekly basis and left staff reeling.
Unfortunately, it was a lie, since his government has subsequently been
involved in the biggest top-down “reorganisation” of the service ever.
On the latter, policies have seen him wrong on both counts.
Austerity has helped worsen matters – including the deficit – to
the extent that even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), hardly a bastion of
anything that could be remotely described as socialist, has criticised the
government for its approach.
So you could be forgiven for imagining that the reality behind
such electioneering statements would be picked up by a conscientious media:
that a prime minister who made them would be help to at least some account.
But no: no more than the reality of statements by secretary of
state for work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, who has been caught out by the
Office for National Statistics – more than once – playing fast and loose with
figures of those claiming benefits or those on benefits for lengthy periods of
time.
Indeed, when once challenged over this, IDS retorted that he
“believed” the figures to be correct – ergot they must be correct.
Thus we now know that only a belief in it is required for a
politician’s statement to be true.
But back to yesterday’s protest.
It took place in Manchester – a sunny Manchester, so presumably
God was smiling on the demonstrators and the cause.
It took place there because the annual Conservative Party
conference has just opened at a conference centre there. It was organised under
the auspices of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and was attended from people
from across the UK.
Both the Conservative Party and the TUC are national bodies. The
conference in question is for the national Conservative Party, and the NHS is a
national health service.
Yet the BBC decided to relegate reports of those 50,000 to
regional news pages.
On the other hand, a report of a man being ill after swallowing
drugs during a drugs bust – also in Manchester – was linked to from the front
page of the website. That, in other words, was decreed editorially to be of
national interest.
The Conservative Party conference is being reported as national,
headline news – as it should be: it’s a national story.
But mass opposition to government isn’t?
Much of the media will avoid the story altogether for entirely
political reasons. Much of the media now works on the basis simply of promoting
the core political-economic agenda of its proprietors. It has long since given
up any idea of being a fourth estate that holds the other three to
accountability.
The BBC should, theoretically, be above this, but it has, over
the last 30 years, allowed itself – under pain of losing the licence fee and
charter, presumably – to dance to the tune of whomsoever is holding the reins
of political power at the time.
It has been dismal on reporting the NHS since 2010, except where
there are negative stories.
Now I dislike conspiracy theories, but one does ask whether it
is entirely a matter of coincidence that the ultimate head of the Beeb, Chris
Patten, has had anything to do with this.
In which case, it is worth noting that Lord Patten seems to have
a conflict of interest on the matter.
Wouldn’t you also wonder about this too?
There have been a number of situations that have occurred in the
last few years where hospitals have seriously erred and patients have seriously
suffered.
But staffing levels have been reduced and it’s hardly rocket
science to say that in health care, there will be safe levels of staffing and
unsafe ones. In the last few years, the posts of more than 5,000 nursing staff
alone have disappeared. That is not conducive to safety.
Waiting times have increased; accident and emergency units are
being strained to the limit – not least after the axing of the NHS Direct
service and the 111 debacle that has followed.
Entire units are being downgraded or threatened with closure:
the scheme, earlier this year, to close the A&E and maternity units to
Lewisham Hospital in London, on the grounds that an entirely different hospital
in a neighbouring borough was struggling financially, is just one illustration
of the state of the fiddling that’s taking place.
In that case, when you add in the information that Lewisham is a
Labour stronghold and the neighbouring borough is a Conservative one, it’s hard
to escape the sense of a nasty smell in the air.
We seem to be headed back to the halcyon days of the last
Conservative government, when elderly people were dying on trolleys in hospital
corridors.
That’s not to pretend that the Labour governments under Tony
Blair and Gordon Brown do not have much to answer for.
The eager adoption of the PFI schemes first imagined by John
Major’s government was always a recipe for disaster, based on short-termism and
an apparent lack of any comprehension of the financial implications of what was
being signed up to.
And Labour also continued and expanded the initial privatisation
of the health service that had begun under Margaret Thatcher, when ‘soft
services’ were put up for sale.
The result of that should have stood as a lesson for all:
perhaps it is a coincidence, but after the numbers of hospital cleaners were
halved in order for private companies to make any money from the service, there
was a concomitant rise in the number of hospital-acquired infections such as
c-diff and MRSA.
Which is a perfect illustration of the operational problems that
privatisation and fragmentation of the service and workforce produces. If
cleaners, for instance, are employed by a company that is outside of the health
service itself, who do the staff answer to?
If the nurses on the ward want to call in a cleaner and have a
job done – and done now – who do the cleaners answer to?
For some years, the trade union UNISON, which organises in the
sector, has been calling for cleaning services to be brought back in house –
and for a restoration of ward sisters who had both the responsibility for and
the authority to organise cleaning as and when it was actually required on the
basis of medical judgement.
Indeed, a few years ago, the union funded research, in a Glasgow
hospital, to see what happened if a ward was returned to such a system, with
proper numbers of cleaning staff. Rates of infection declined and costs went
down at the same time. Report here.
Yet Labour continued down the same privatisation road, selling
off the likes of NHS Logistics to parcel company DHL in 2006.
That was an award-winning arm of the health service that
delivered everything from beds to bedpans. There was no business case and none
was ever given - in spite of demands for one from unions and other campaigners.
None of this is to say that the NHS had or has no problems. It's
a vast organisation, so of course it will.
But much of the media has been complicit in spreading the lie
that it is failing on most counts, and failing to challenge the other lie that
a privatised system such as that of the US is better.
Indeed, the US spends more per person on healthcare than the UK
and has worse outcomes. And the reality of private health insurance there,
where small-print - or even downright invisible print - can see people
consigned, in effect, to poverty and/or death when serious conditions emerge,
should warn anyone against following such a path.
But 30 years have seen the UK electorate sold the lie that
private is always better than public – and even as we see fuel poverty rising,
in part because of the massive rises charged for costs of domestic fuel by
highly profitable private companies – the privatisation goes on, even without
any massive debate over what it will offer the country as a whole and whether
it will actually benefit the national economy.
And nor is it just the likes of the Royal Mail.
In Cambridgeshire, Hinchingbrooke Hospital was handed over to
Circle, a private company, which has already had to go, cap in hand, to
government for a loan of £3.5 million. Since when did private companies in a
market economy get to beg government to bail them out if private is so much
better than public?
Yet further hospitals could be headed in the same direction,
including George Eliot in Nuneaton.
So yesterday’s protest, which passed outside the Conservative
Party conference, was hardly a local story.
A BBC correspondent claimed, via social media, that it had been
stopped from filming the demonstration outside the conference centre by
security.
Conference security is being provided by G4S, which cocked up
mightily last year when it was supposed to provide security for the Olympics,
and the state had to sort out the mess, with soldiers drafted in at the last
minute – in many cases, straight after tours of duty in places such as
Afghanistan.
It’s also the same company that has, since then, been found
(along with Serco) to have been overcharging the government (ie the taxpayer)
for services in the justice sector.
One wonders why the Tories want such a dodgy company guarding
them in the first place. But if the claim of that BBC correspondent is correct,
and a private firm that has been awarded millions of pounds worth of contracts
(in spite of dodgy or inadequate behaviour), and is unelected and
unaccountable, is getting to help censor the news, then that causes another
nasty smell to impinge on the nostrils.
Not that this excuses the BBC. G4S couldn’t stop them filming
other parts of the demonstration or the rally that followed. And frankly, they
should have tried to find some balls and film anyway – the roads around the
conference centre are not private property – and see what G4S was going to try
to do about it.
Because it would raise further points if a private company tried
to start invoking anti-terrorism legislation to stop the filming of an entirely
legal demonstration that was following its entirely legal and agreed route.
All of this is a mess – and not least because of the mess that
is the UK’s mainstream news media at present, where any belief in the role of
informing the populace has been subsumed by an agenda of pouring out uncritical
propaganda for, by and large, the neo-liberal agenda.
And that in turn is why the present abject, cowering behaviour
of the BBC is of equal concern.
Further reading
