Drop the Health and Social Care Bill; action still possible

The epetition that “Calls on the Government to drop its Health and Social Care Bill.” is well past the 100,000 mark. In fact it is on 164,000+. Sadly, the Backbench Business Committee (BBCom) has decided las Tuesday not to debate it. But they are obliged to take further arguments from MPs. 

Time is short. The Government intends to end all debate on the Bill on March 20th.

We can press our MPs to lobby the BBCom debate dropping the HSC Bill, and we can also bring pressure directly on the Backbench Business Committee by emailing and phoning. Here they are.

This is what I wrote to the Chair:

Dear Ms Engel

I write as a retired GP who is concerned that the NHS in which I was privileged to serve is facing a real and serious threat from the Health and Social Care Bill.

Like many other citizens, I was deeply disappointed by the decision of your committee not to allocate time to debate the proposal that the Government should drop the Bill.
The e-petition calling for this now stands at 164,410.

I appreciate that there is limited time for debates, but you have 35 slots in the current session, so this is not an absolute block.

I appreciate that the Health Bill has been debated before. Its Second Reading was given one day.
However the Bill is complex - three times as long as the Bill which set up the NHS - and the specific call to drop the Bill outright has not been debated before.
Therefore the argument that the Bill has been debated already has no merit.

The call to drop the HSC Bill satisfies the BBCom criteria of being "topical and relevant".

I have read that the Committee did not think there was wide support for the debate among members.
If so, this would indicate a serious disconnect between the opinions of MPs and feeling in the country.
It is true that the public is singularly ill-informed about the implications of the Bill, because the newspapers genrally have not given it the salience it deserves.
Even so, support in the general population for pressing ahead with the NHS reforms stands at only 33%, as against 52% who believe that the Bill should be dropped.

You do not need me to remind you that the professional bodies who are well informed are overwhelmingly against it, and even Conservative commentators and Cabinet Ministers are calling for it to be dropped.

This is an urgent matter, as the Government today has indicated that they wish to end debate on March 20th.


I hope therefore that the Backbench Business Committee will listen carefully and sympathetically to MPs' further representations at later meetings of Committee to argue the case for the subject of the e-petition to be debated.


Sincerely

Dr Richard Lawson MB BS, MRCPsych

We can defeat Lansley's hated Health & Social Care Bill

[open and play the Andrew Lansley greedy tosser rap in another tab will enhance your reading experience of this post]
Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill (the NHS Bill) can and must be stopped.

The latest blow to his ambitions to slice and dice the NHS and offer it to the corporate vultures as a carcass comes from the Health Select Committee of Parliament, which will report that Lansley's "reforms" will are interfering with the already demanding and damaging process of trying to make 4% annual efficiency savings.

This is in addition to the demands of all the major health workers organisations who are united in wanting the Coalition to drop the bill.

Core criticisms are:

• It will cost £2-3 billion 
• It ends  the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Health for the NHS.
• It has no electoral mandate. It is not in the Conservative or LibDem manifestos or even the Coalition agreement.
• It contains a clause that NHS hospitals can earn up to 49% of their income from private patients.
• Giving full budgetary responsibility to GPs will distract from their attention to patients and break the vital bond of trust. 
• It opens up the NHS to marketization which will allow progressive infiltration by American private healthcare corporations who are desperate to grow now that they have finished growing in the USA.
• An enormous array of informed health organisations oppose it.

These are just a few of the reasons to oppose the bill.

If it is not defeated, the British people will have let one of the best institutions in our country to die through ignorance, apathy and resignation.

It can be stopped. There is a Parliamentary ePetition that simply calls for MPs to debate a motion to Drop The Bill. It is here. Please sign it and ask your friends to sign it. It is has reached 34,000 today, and when it reaches 100,000 MPs will be obliged to debate dropping the bill. We will need to besiege Parliament on the day of the debate in order to focus the minds of the MPs.

NHS. RIP. Thanks to Daily Mail type journalists

In a mood of sadness and grief I went to see my MP John Penrose (Con, Tourism Minister) yesterday, about the NHS Bill.

I just told him about my life spent in service of the NHS , which for all its faults, is infinitely better and more efficient than the US system. Lansley's reforms are taking us rapidly towards that system. I told him how sad it made me feel that people are going to lose it.

The last regular option for us is to get 100k signatures on this e-petition which calls of the Government to drop the NHS Bill.
It has 14k signatures at the moment.
It could be done, with massive viral circulation, but it doesn't look hopeful.

There's a Drop the Bill website here with some good info.

But John Penrose told me it is all done and dusted, will come back from the Lords, and then get Royal Assent.

I'm going to try to find out what Royal Assent means in terms of procedure. Clearly the Queen has to sign it. Do they post it to her, or is the Bill taken to Buckingham Palace in a sedan chair or something?

If so, we could blockade Buckingham Palace with our bodies.

We could also write to the Queen and ask her to refuse to sign, or at least insist that Andrew Lansley personally holds her right forearm and moves it about to make a part-Royal squiggle that could be challenged in the courts.

Dreams of course. It is impossible that the British people, misinformed as they are by a corporate media, would bestir themselves to defend the NHS, turning out in numbers to block the loss of the best thing that the UK has ever done.

It is all very sad. I feel sad and angry - and the anger primarily has to be directed to the journalistic profession, who did not convey true information about the NHS Bill to their readers and listeners.

When people find out what has happened, in 2 or 3 years, they are going to be really angry. Really Angry. Which will probably mean that lots of people get hurt, and will have to wait for days in a dirty crowded A&E department waiting to be treated.