I am lucky to have never spent a night in hospital in all my 54 years. After reading this young nurse's cry for help, the thought of me or any of my family doing so, terrifies me. It's stories like this that make me want to do something, anything, to try to change this cash-centric, target-led culture that takes the careers of good-hearted, emotional philanthropists and bleeds them dry, while the likes of Cameron, indifferently blow £15m on a museum in tribute to that grandmo...ther of detached cruelty, Margaret Thatcher.
I started my working life in NHS administration and remember a service where prescriptions were free to everyone, dental and ophthalmic treatment was readily available and affordable, hospital food was of such a high standard and produced in proper in-house kitchens that as a young man, I ate almost daily, in the staff canteen, which served the same food as to the patients. The last time I visited a friend in hospital, he was begging me to take food in for him as the externally-produced, junk-food that was supposed to be nourishing him back to health, was making him feel more ill and the portions were so small he felt he was starving.
I proposed strike action against the afore-mentioned, heartless, Tory harridan back in the early eighties - and won the vote almost unanimously. The writing on the wall was as clear then, as it is now - more ugly and socially divisive than any inner city graffiti.
I appreciate that we're living longer and that hospital treatment is more technologically advanced. However, I think it is time we looked at the profits being drained from the service by the global corporations who manufacture the drugs and equipment the NHS pays a fortune for. We need to investigate the venture capitalists now being brought in at a cost of millions, to consult and advise on which bits of the service to sell off, to a queue of eager, blood-suckers. It is the single, most-important area where I believe privatisation should be reconsidered, so that profits can be ploughed back into the service, rather than used to pay for fat-cat bonuses and share dividends.
Ed Miliband may have made a couple of dodgy choices on 'Desert Island Discs' and have a smile that reminds some of a Nick Parks puppet, but we should not let the press use those insignificant and immature jibes to disguise what the Conservatives are doing and ridicule the man who is our best, or even our ONLY hope to stop this rot. We need a Labour government more now than perhaps at any other time in our history, if our children are not going to end up as Gove-educated, second-class citizens enslaved by student debt and by an ever more powerful, greedy and wealthy elite. That is not the politics of envy or even a condemnation of those who have more than others - that's what the right-wing press would want the public to believe - that Labour or Socialism, is the same as Communism. It isn't. Modern day Socialism is about supporting businesses and enterprise while simultaneously helping those in need. Those who have worked hard helping to grow the success and profits of the businesses in which they've been employed, those who have worked hard providing services to others, those who have worked hard launching new businesses, those who have worked hard caring for our sick and elderly, those who have worked hard teaching our children, and those who have worked hard being entrepreneurs and inventors. They're all worthy and all deserve to be able to better themselves and benefit from their success but it needn't be at the expense of those dying on trolleys in hospital corridors, or the increasing number of those living on the charity of food banks or sleeping rough on our streets, or our future generations who will probably start their working life in debt and live out their entire lives under its soul-destroying burden. This isn't what I want for my kids and I doubt anyone else wants it for theirs.
Britain can do better than this.
I started my working life in NHS administration and remember a service where prescriptions were free to everyone, dental and ophthalmic treatment was readily available and affordable, hospital food was of such a high standard and produced in proper in-house kitchens that as a young man, I ate almost daily, in the staff canteen, which served the same food as to the patients. The last time I visited a friend in hospital, he was begging me to take food in for him as the externally-produced, junk-food that was supposed to be nourishing him back to health, was making him feel more ill and the portions were so small he felt he was starving.
I proposed strike action against the afore-mentioned, heartless, Tory harridan back in the early eighties - and won the vote almost unanimously. The writing on the wall was as clear then, as it is now - more ugly and socially divisive than any inner city graffiti.
I appreciate that we're living longer and that hospital treatment is more technologically advanced. However, I think it is time we looked at the profits being drained from the service by the global corporations who manufacture the drugs and equipment the NHS pays a fortune for. We need to investigate the venture capitalists now being brought in at a cost of millions, to consult and advise on which bits of the service to sell off, to a queue of eager, blood-suckers. It is the single, most-important area where I believe privatisation should be reconsidered, so that profits can be ploughed back into the service, rather than used to pay for fat-cat bonuses and share dividends.
Ed Miliband may have made a couple of dodgy choices on 'Desert Island Discs' and have a smile that reminds some of a Nick Parks puppet, but we should not let the press use those insignificant and immature jibes to disguise what the Conservatives are doing and ridicule the man who is our best, or even our ONLY hope to stop this rot. We need a Labour government more now than perhaps at any other time in our history, if our children are not going to end up as Gove-educated, second-class citizens enslaved by student debt and by an ever more powerful, greedy and wealthy elite. That is not the politics of envy or even a condemnation of those who have more than others - that's what the right-wing press would want the public to believe - that Labour or Socialism, is the same as Communism. It isn't. Modern day Socialism is about supporting businesses and enterprise while simultaneously helping those in need. Those who have worked hard helping to grow the success and profits of the businesses in which they've been employed, those who have worked hard providing services to others, those who have worked hard launching new businesses, those who have worked hard caring for our sick and elderly, those who have worked hard teaching our children, and those who have worked hard being entrepreneurs and inventors. They're all worthy and all deserve to be able to better themselves and benefit from their success but it needn't be at the expense of those dying on trolleys in hospital corridors, or the increasing number of those living on the charity of food banks or sleeping rough on our streets, or our future generations who will probably start their working life in debt and live out their entire lives under its soul-destroying burden. This isn't what I want for my kids and I doubt anyone else wants it for theirs.
Britain can do better than this.
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