Liberal Democrat NHS Betrayal

The Conservatives promised before the 2010 general election not to impose a top-down reorganisation of the NHS. What followed was one of the most fundamental NHS reorganisations yet envisaged, which generated especially widespread "opprobrium" (quote from Wikipedia). This Path to Privatisation was achieved with the active help and support of the Liberal Democrats and by building on the privatisation started under New Labour. (Remember the great PFI scandals?) Now more than a third of doctors on the new clinical commissioning groups have links with private health-care companies. The Liberal Democrats in government have become notorious for reneging on their manifesto promises. Whilst their disgraceful volte-face on both tuition fees and electoral reform are well known, it is their betrayal of the NHS that is most unforgiveable in my opinion. The Liberal Democrats pledged to "cut NHS centralised targets and bureaucracy" and improve waiting times (Lib Dem Manifesto 2010). We now know the exact opposite has happened, with Accident and Emergency departments across the country crumbling after the coalition government, including the Liberal Democrats, reduced their funding to just one third of what they need. NHS England (created as part of this mammoth reorganisation) reports that it missed its four-hour waiting-limit target by 2.4% for the last quarter of 2014. The money wasted on this reorganisation, along with direct cuts in the Accident and Emergency budget, has led to 133,000 people waiting more than four hours and NHS performance dropping to its worst level for a decade. Now here is a pledge that will not be broken. The Green Party will take the NHS back into public ownership and ensure it is adequately funded. This means an extra £8bn by 2020, funded in part by cancelling Trident. Here are some of the Green Party health policies: The Party will continue to support the principle that the NHS is a national service, free at the point of entry and fully funded by taxation. Opposition to third-way health reform, so we actively oppose and seek to reverse any public-service health-policy reforms that lead to: • a two- or multi-tier health service with uneven standards and service provision, • further disconnection of the service from public accountability – via local, regional or national government, • the undermining of a fully integrated NHS, publicly funded and committed to high-quality universal provision with free services at the point of use, or • creeping privatisation. What can you do to campaign to keep the NHS public? Join the national events in February 2015, which can be found easily on the Keep Our NHS Public website http://www.keepournhspublic.com/index.php. I also recommend you read NHS SOS, available from the publishers, One World. Proceeds from NHS SOS will go to Keep Our NHS Public. The May 2015 election will be vital in deciding the future of the NHS. NHS SOS shows that the Conservatives (supported by the Lib Dems) clearly wish to privatise the NHS, have already started the process and will continue to do so. They appear to be lining up their friends in private companies for lucrative contracts. The book also highlights Labour’s involvement in privatisation and the Private Finance Initiative. The Green Party is the clear choice if you want to keep the NHS public. “A free health service is a triumphant example of the superiority of the principles of collective action and public initiative against the commercial principle of profit and greed.” Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear.

Lib Dem Choices

We recently heard that a Lib Dem MP was likely to choose to vote for the tripling of university tuition fees to "punish" students for daring to demonstrate at his office. Today (8/12/2010) we have Nick Clegg telling us it is all about choices. So let's see what he has chosen to do instead of honouring his pledge on tuition fees.
The Lib Dem choice is to spend billions of pounds on fighting a war in Afghanistan, rather than on educating our children. The Lib Dem choice is to invest billions in nuclear power stations, none of which will be operational before the shortfall in energy predicted by Ofgen in 2015 and which will leave our children with a legacy of nuclear waste as well as debts of £39,000 each. The Lib Dem choice is to spend billions on a replacement for the Trident nuclear missile system, to let the banks pay only a fraction of what their mistakes cost the UK taxpayer and let tax dodgers squirrel away untaxed billions in tax havens.
Most shamefully for me, a former Liberal Democrat candidate, is that all of those decisions represent promises made by Lib Dems at the general election, which have been broken within weeks of getting elected. Nick Clegg was lying then and is lying now. He said that no Westminster party was offering to abolish tuition fees. The Green Party and our leader, Caroline Lucas MP has long called for the abolition of tuition fees, paid for by not doing the things above that Lib Dems said they would not do. In addition millions would be saved just abandoning the bureaucracy of collecting tuition fees.
Sadly, we know that the Lib Dems (unlike Caroline Lucas) are now an irrelevance in Parliament. Whatever they decide to do on the Tuition Fees vote, they are too divided to make a difference to the outcome. However, if they all vote against a rise in tuition fees as they promised at the general election, they might just save what little credibility they have left.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

There is nothing more shameful than for politicians, only a few months after an election, to renege on an election promise. Abolishing University tuition fees was not only part of the Liberal Democrat manifesto, but it was also a written pledge by every Lib Dem candidate who publicly signed their name to a written undertaking. It was a central part of the Lib Dem claim to fairness, along with opposing Trident and a promise of proportional representation (AV is not PR).

The Lib Dems have now broken all of these promises, but nothing is more shameful than their complete volte-face on tuition fees. Instead of abolishing tuition fees, Vince Cable has announced they could quadruple up to £12,000!

The British Medical Association warned: "Graduates are currently leaving medical school with an estimated £37,000 worth of debt under the present £3,290 annual fee. There is the potential that some students could incur debts up to and beyond £100,000 if fees are set at £10,000 or above by medical schools."

It is no wonder people do not trust politicians, when the Liberal Democrats betray our trust in this way. It is neither liberal nor democratic to lie to us the way the Lib Dems have done.

Compare and contrast Caroline Lucas, the single Green MP, who has already had more impact on the House of Commons than the whole Lib Dem backbench put together. Clive Aslet, editor-at-large of Country Life magazine said, “She appears to be doing the work that might otherwise be done by several dozen politicians.”