Orwell warned us to be afraid of the ‘Big Society’ idea

SO WHAT are we really to make of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’?

Only time will tell, as they say, and this lot’s self-imposed title of the ‘listening government’ will be just another case of ‘listen, ignore and then cut’, which we all know will also be heavily disguised.

They have also said that we should all help more in the community but, with these cuts causing more joblessness and people having more time on their hands, this is the complete reality of what Cameron really means by helping in the community.

We are now being told that it was the previous Government that broke Britain, but let’s face up to it and see that it was really the banks that broke Britain. They then went and gave their shareholders massive pay-outs at the expense of ordinary investors and savers, many of whom have lost life savings by putting their hard-earned money into these banks in the first place.

Conservatism and banking has always gone pretty much hand-in-hand – something that many of us won’t even be able to afford soon! So on this alone, I say let the bankers start all this voluntary helping in the community. Have we all forgotten so soon about Mrs Thatcher when she advocated that those with mental problems should be taken out of hospitals and be into their relatives’ care in the community, who could do a better job.

We all know now how that has turned out.

The so-called ‘Big Society’ will make society just the opposite. It will become small and insular and make those who are really in need become more and more desperate by leaving them on their own to try to survive the daily grind.

Public services will be done on the cheap and things like your weekly bin collections will get less and less, but no doubt we will all get more and more bins to add to the multi-coloured collection we have at the moment.

Now, there is also talk of parents creating their own schools. This again will just turn us into an elitist educational society as those with the money will rule the roost and those from the lesser well-off areas will be pushed aside. This will see those from areas that just need a little push and help, like they do in today’s system, ostracised permanently.

The little spark that would be lit and encouraged to burn brightly in the future will be extinguished for good. Some years ago the literary genius of his time wrote about the big society of the future. His name was George Orwell. We were warned then. This isn’t the ‘Big Brother’ of the reality TV series, this is past predictions on our doorsteps now. I half expect to hear Big Ben strike thirteen times any day now. Remember, we were warned.

Jon Snow v Zac Goldsmith: “A complete travesty of the truth”

In true car-crash television, Zac Goldsmith spends the first seven minutes of the interview ranting at Channel 4 News in a way that would have had even Alastair Campbell cringeing with embarrassment.

You can watch the full broadcast here:

Tory donor’s firm will make millions from NHS shake-up

A private health firm is set to rake in millions from a shake-up of the NHS – eight months after the boss’s wife donated £21,000 to Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley.

Care UK expects to earn a fortune in the biggest reform of the NHS for 60 years as private companies win a lucrative role in providing services to local GPs.

As one of the UK’s biggest healthcare providers, it already runs GP surgeries, NHS walk-in centres and cares for half a million people a year.

And Mr Lansley faces accusations of a conflict of interest for accepting a donation from the wife of John Nash, chairman of Care UK at the time of the donation.

The row comes amid warnings that Mr Lansley’s shake-up will cost thousands of jobs and represents a giant gamble with the nation’s health.

There is also mounting anger that not a word of his plans was put before voters at the election.

Nor was it mentioned in the Tories’ coalition agreement with the Lib Dems.

The Health Secretary accepted Caroline Nash’s money in November to help pay for the running of his private office. The hand-out came just weeks after her husband predicted future Government policy would help make his company – which earns 96 per cent of its money from the NHS – even richer.

Mr Nash stood down as chairman in March, when Care UK sold out to a private equity firm, but he is still a consultant. Unite’s nursing spokesman Barrie Brown said: “These dangerous and untested ConDem plans will see private companies given an even greater stake in the NHS.

“And it is particularly alarming how one of the biggest private healthcare firms out there could be so closely aligned to Mr Lansley.”

Dr John Lister, of campaign group Health Emergency, added: “The fact that the man in charge of dismantling the NHS has taken cash from one of the companies looking to profit from his plans stinks.” Under Mr Lansley’s plans announced last week, primary care trusts will be scrapped and family doctors given £80billion to spend.

Now private companies are gearing up to help GPs manage their new roles in a market worth up to £500million.

A spokesman for Care UK said yesterday: “The donation was from our former chairman’s wife, who we understand regularly makes donations to the Conservative Party.”

This post was first published on The Mirror

Facebook confirms our worst suspicions

Up to 40% of police jobs ‘to be cut’

Up to 60,000 police jobs could be lost as a result of government spending cuts, a study suggests.

The study, based on public spending projections from the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), found the “worst-case” scenario could see 40% of the total workforce being axed across England and Wales by 2015.

It warns that over the next five years at least 11,500 police officer and staff posts could be axed and that this figure could reach 60,000 when the government completes its spending review in the autumn.

Tim Brain, the recently retired chief constable of Gloucestershire Constabulary and now Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff University, estimates that funding levels to the police force could reduce by 6.7% over the next five years, and the cuts will vary across forces. Looking at the impact on police pay, he predicts that there will be no pay increases between 2014 and 2015.

The study comes only a month after home secretary Theresa May said front-line police activity should be increased.

According to figures released by the British Crime Survey (BCS) today, there were 900,000 fewer crimes in England and Wales last year – lower than when Labour came to office in 1997. Shadow Policing Minister David Hanson MP told BBC news last night that such progress is likely to be reversed by the government’s actions.

“We need to ask serious questions about the Government’s commitment to reducing crime and protecting the British people.”

There has always been a progressive case for strong safeguards against criminals who rip off and terrorise mainly people in working class communities. But these priorities are not Tory priorities.

Tories say ‘we’re all in this together’ as they vote themselves huge hikes in pay and perks

As the government attempts to suggest that “we’re all in this together” at a time of deep cuts to public services, it has today emerged that Tory councillors have awarded themselves pay rises of up to 100 per cent.

The Conservatives were accused of hypocrisy after Barnet Council voted for large hikes in its allowances and the Tory-run Local Government Association recommended a wider pay rise of 2.3 per cent for all councillors.

Barnet council last night authorised huge increases in the taxpayer-funded allowances for its politicians.

Council leader Lynne Hillan will now be entitled to £64,824 a year — an instant pay rise of £19,941.

The allowance payable to cabinet members will rocket by 99 per cent from £17,454.50 to £34,780.

Youtube: The Common People. Excellent anti-Tory video.

Old news but still absolutely superb.

Tory cuts could condemn generation of youngsters to life on the dole

THE Con-Dem Government has been accused of abandoning a generation of youngsters to life on the dole.

Government cuts to job programmes will leave another 120,000 graduates and school leavers out in the cold.

The number of unemployed 18-24-year-olds already stands at 926,000. Labour said the Government were forcing young people to pay the price of their unfair cutbacks.

The number of university places has been reduced by 10,000.

The Government have also scrapped recruitment subsidies for firms who are willing to take on anyone who has been out of work for six months or more.

They have also scrapped the youth guarantee, which promises work, training or an internship to 18-24-year-olds struggling to get a job.

The Government’s Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that Chancellor George Osborne’s moves will put 600,000 jobs at risk.

And a leaked Treasury report has said as many as 1.3million private and public sector jobs could go as a result of the cuts.

There are fears the Tories are repeating the mistakes of the 1980s which saw waves of school leavers condemned to life on benefits.

Shadow work and pensions secretary Yvette Cooper said Labour’s policies helped limit the number of young unemployed.

She added: “By axing the future jobs fund, the youth guarantee and cutting the number of university places, the Con-Dems are wasting the talent of a generation and risk condemning them to long-term unemployment.

“Once again, the Con-Dems have decided to abandon a generation of young people, just as Margaret Thatcher did in the 80s.

“They are cutting jobs in the economy and cutting help for the unemployed at the same time.”

NHS: The Beginning of the End

The fact that a Conservative government are drawing up plans to dismantle the National Health Service can come as no surprise to anyone who has listened to anything they have said for the last five years. Those who blindly voted Tory looking for nebulous “change” should note that the grass is not always greener on the other side of the polyclinic.

The fact that the NHS will be broken up whilst the Liberal Democrats are in government may come as more of a surprise to many. But a review of their manifesto provides plenty of warnings.

Before the election, back when they were concentrating on Bringing Back Fairness, they committed to scrapping Strategic Health Authorities. They also talked about elected Local Health Boards, which would supplant the Primary Care Trust as the main commissioning body. The only difference between that plan and the Lansley plan is the removal of the public. Ironic that the Lib Dems should implement their policy having carefully removed the democracy

The National Health Service will remain the largest health insurance scheme in the world but, after these changes are implemented, it will be in the hands of private companies, all of which will have a duty to their shareholders to take money out of the system.

Let’s look at this main change of “Physician-led Commissioning.” This means that, rather than the local Primary Care Trust making decisions as to where money should be spent, those decisions will be taken by a consortium of around 70 GPs. They will decide which specialist services are available in their local areas, and how different proportions of their money should be spent.

The rationale for this is that GPs who are seeing patients every day are better placed to make these decisions than the much maligned NHS managers who are bleeding our hospitals dry, etc.

Of course, rather than being the bogey men they are portrayed, most NHS managers do a good job of taking these administrative decisions away from GPs, who have much more important things to deal with. Like you. Asking a GP to deal with this level of bureaucracy would be like pulling Steven Gerrard off at half time so that he can help renegotiate the Liverpool FC overdraft. His job is to score goals.

The GP’s job is to look after patients.

Of course, GPs are no fools. They know they are not qualified to make strategic decisions – they have a ground-level perspective which is beyond comparison. But a great platoon commander does not always make a good General. Most GPs got into the job to treat patients, not to stand behind a desk directing resources across the NHS battlefield.

For this reason, these GP consortia will outsource the management of this responsibility to private companies. These firms of consultants will spring up over the next few years in response to the changes. Some will be owned and operated under American management as this system is more commonplace in the United States. Like any private company, their first obligation will be to their shareholders, and so any profit made will be taken straight out of the NHS and away from patients.

These companies will be staffed by the only people who have any experience in strategic healthcare provision – the staff of the defunct Primary Care Trusts who have just been made redundant.

So GPs will pay a private company to come in. That private company will pay its staff considerably less than they were earning within the NHS, charge the GPs a fraction less than the previous cost of the PCT, and keep the profit for themselves. This will be trumpeted as a victory for the public purse. When the reality is that we just funnelled money directly into the private sector at the expense of workers.

And with private money comes private competition. What will happen when GPs, having studied for over a decade to be an expert clinician, prove themselves unsurprisingly hopeless at running a business? As with failing schools, the best private firms will be brought in to “rescue” the surgery.

Costs are cut, staff are laid off, the level of service to the customer / patient falls away but the books are balanced. The private firm takes its profit and the surgery gets a big blue tick next to its name in the government’s ledger. Another successful surgery.

Unless you’re trying to phone them. You see, they’ve saved money by using one of those interactive voice menus and laying off a member of staff. Great profit centre, but you can’t actually speak to a human being.

Welcome to the brave new world of healthcare provision. To put your head in your hands and weep, please press 1.

This post was first published at The Confidence Interval

Comment: LibDems sold their souls for a few pieces of silver. And we will pay the price.

The Liberal Democrats have bought into the big right-wing lie that massive cuts are inevitable and that ‘There Is No Alternative’, turning the tail on their own statements before the election.

I heard this lie once before – 30 years ago – from the Tories. It was as much a lie then as it is now.

These cuts are ideological, driven by a bunch of graceless, charmless, clueless public school nincompoops who have never been short in their lives.

They are a million miles removed from the ordinary people, hundreds of thousands of them, who are going to lose their homes and end up on the streets thanks to the policies of the Lib Dems and the Tories.

Do you actually know who got us into this mess? Do you really believe it was greedy nurses and teachers siphoning off their money into Cayman Islands bank accounts?

No, it was the Tories’ mates, who did just that and now ordinary people are going to pay a terrible price for what they’ve done to our country. There are no sanctions against them, no recovery action, nothing. They are getting away with criminal greed and criminal irresponsibility.

There is not one MP in government who deserves to be in government today, not one. They are all economically autistic, they have no real world experience, and are puppeteered by Murdoch and other shady far-right wing interests who keep their heads well below the parapet.

The best chance for ordinary people back in May was for Labour to win and tack to the Left, back to the ground that politics used to occupy before 1979 and Thatcherism ratcheted everyone rightwards.

Some say all the parties are the same. Maybe so. Maybe when you are standing there in the street, with your possessions all round you, having been removed by bailiffs, and you have nowhere to go, the reality of what is happening to this country will hit home to you.

We are now governed by arrogant rich kids who relish the idea of grinding the noises of ordinary people into the dust, and depriving them of what protection and rights at work they still have. The legal aid budget is to be slashed too, so further reducing their chances of obtaining legal representation to combat the injustices being meted out on them.

The Liberal Democrats support all this, the most right wing agenda for decades.

It’s time that Lib Dems decided where their true loyalties lay – and many have already. Labour’s membership is up by 25000 since the election, and Lib Dems are deserting in droves in disgust and coming over to Labour.

The Lib Dems could have refused to enter a coalition with the Tories, and instead joined with Labour in resisting the programmes of Tory nonsense we now see unfolding. Together they could have prevented this slaughter of the public services and the loss of millions of jobs in both public and private sectors.

But no. Their leaders were intoxicated by the sniff of power and sold their party’s fundamental principles down the river.

Nick Clegg will be out of parliament come the next election, and so will Danny Alexander and Cable. They will be taught a lesson for what they have done.

The only snag about that is that millions of us will have to pay for their greed, selfishness and lack of principle.