Wings Over Scotland

This is Andy Burnham, Labour’s shadow health secretary, earlier this week:

“‘Commissioners have been ordered to put all services out to the market, NHS spending on private and other providers has gone through the £10bn barrier for the first time.

When did the British public ever give their consent for this? It is indefensible for the character of the country’s most valued institution to be changed in this way without the public being given a say.’

Mr Burnham has written to the boss of NHS England, Simon Stevens, to call for a pause in privatisation unless patient safety or service is at risk.”

And here’s a press release from the Unite trade union in 2009, when Labour were in power and Mr Burnham actually was the Health Secretary:

“‘Roll back the privatisation of the NHS, Andy’

Unite presented a letter signed by 3,000 NHS members to the Department of Health today (Wednesday, 26 August), calling on health secretary Andy Burnham to halt the privatisation of the health service.

The [letter] was part of Unite’s Health B4 Profit campaign designed to preserve the NHS as ‘a publicly owned, publicly accountable, universal and comprehensive health service managed and run for the public good’.

Unite said that an estimated £20 billion would be spent on creating the bureaucratic market infrastructure for privatisation – money that could be better spent on frontline services.

Karen Reay said: ‘Today, we are asking Andy Burnham to protect the heart and soul of the NHS in England and roll back these costly and dangerous plans.

‘The continuing vicious attacks by vested interests on President Obama over his plans to provide healthcare for the estimated 47 million Americans currently without this safety net is a stark warning of what awaits British citizens, if the mercenary forces of privatisation are allowed to triumph.'”

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There’s a remarkable story on the BBC website today. Torn between the referendum campaign and the 2015 UK election campaign, Labour’s health spokesman Andy Burnham has finally admitted in public that yes, NHS England IS being privatised.

But it’s what he wants done about it that made us double-take.

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The Stevenage Advertiser, 22 July 2014:

“‘Lessons must be learned’ from the death of a Stevenage diabetic who could not afford electricity to keep his insulin cool after his benefits were stopped.

Former soldier David Clapson died aged 59 at his home in Hillside from fatal diabetic keto-acidosis, which the NHS calls ‘a dangerous complication of diabetes caused by a lack of insulin.‘

His jobseeker’s allowance of approximately £70 a week – on which his family says he was reliant – had been suspended three weeks before on June 28, for missing meetings.

According to his family, Mr Clapson was found “alone, penniless and starving” a short distance from a pile of printed CVs, with nothing to his name but £3.44, six tea bags, a tin of soup and an out-of-date tin of sardines.

The coroner found that David – a former BT engineer of 16 years, who had served two years in Northern Ireland with the Royal Corps of Signals during The Troubles – had nothing in his stomach when he died.”

We can’t do any better than that. Vote No, everyone. UK OK!

We suspect this isn’t one of the ones Mr Darling gets paid £10,000 for.

Still, only putting out 12 seats is one way to guarantee a “standing room only” crowd.

The Wee Blue Book is extremely close to finished now, readers. We’re just buffing the corners. But we thought you might like to get a head start on one bit of it.

As well as trying to answer all the reasonable and sensible questions that undecided or No voters might have of the Yes side, the book will encourage them to ask a few tricky ones of their No representatives too, because we’ve been waiting two-and-a-half years for the media to do it with no luck.

But as you’ve been so awesome at writing to your MPs and MSPs before, enabling us to (for example) shed some cruelly harsh light on the full shambolic incoherence of Labour’s devolution plans, it seemed only fair that you got to have a go first.

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Yesterday a number of news outlets including the Scotsman, the Courier and STV all carried a scare story from Gordon Brown about independence ending cross-border organ transplants. Curiously, none of them had thought to check the allegation with NHS Blood & Transplant, so we did it for them, and got the unequivocal and unambiguous answer back that “Scottish independence will not affect organ donation and the system will continue as it does currently.”

You’d imagine that the publications concerned would have wanted to put their readers’ minds at rest by publishing that categorical reasssurance today, wouldn’t you?

You know how the rest goes by now, readers.

We got our reply (emphasis added):

“Good afternoon,

Thank you for your recent telephone call to the NHSBT Donor Line.

I can confirm that Scottish independence will not affect organ donation and the system will continue as it does currently.

I hope this answers your query, please let me know if you require any further information and I will be happy to help.

Kind regards,

Tom Kempster
ODR Assistant

NHS Blood and Transplant
Organ Donation and Transplantation Directorate
Fox Den Road
Stoke Gifford
Bristol
BS34 8RR”

Tom didn’t actually say the words “Gordon Brown is lying through his teeth to terrify Scottish people into voting No”, but we think it’s pretty much implied.

We telephoned Organ Donation Scotland on Friday for their reaction to the despicable scare stories being put around by a teenage Labour activist from Liverpool bussed up to Scotland last week by the No campaign.

We’re still waiting for them to get back to us with a quote. But in the meantime, it’s been predictable – but no less disgraceful – to see senior Labour figures repeating the lie. It all seems to be part of a major Unionist offensive on health, doubtless sparked by fears that privatisation of the English NHS will lead to a significant reduction in the Scottish block grant and corresponding damage to the Scottish health service.

The No camp, unsurprisingly, has chosen to fight fear with fear.

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Alert readers might be thinking that headline sounds vaguely familiar and they’d be right, because we published a post two months ago with a similar title, highlighting the curiously inverse relationship between media scare stories about alleged abuse in the referendum campaign for which there’s no evidence whatsoever and actual abuse that really happened.

We were put in mind of it this week, after the Daily Record ran a particularly barrel-scraping “vile cybernats” piece about how a Labour activist from England got a little bit of extremely mild stick on Twitter after announcing he was on his way to Scotland to stick his nose in the independence debate, and how he WORRIED that he might meet a hostile reception at the railway station (although of course, and happily, he didn’t).

“Better Together” campaign leaders Blair McDougall and Alistair Darling constantly demand that the Yes campaign, and Alex Salmond in particular, takes responsibility for and action against random online nutters behaving in abusive or threatening ways, even when those people have no discernible connection to Yes Scotland or the SNP.

But they’re less keen on putting their own house in order.

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A post appeared on the news-and-discussion site Reddit Scotland last night. We’ve reproduced it in full below, because it seems like something people should know.

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Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald, 13 July 2014:

“The Scottish Parliament is responsible for health in Scotland but funding remains with Westminster through the Barnett Formula, which increases or decreases every year in line with health spending in England. The intention of the UK health reforms is to get private companies to take on more and more of the work of the NHS, reducing the contribution made by the taxpayer.

This will inevitably reduce the funding that comes to Scotland, even assuming the Barnett Formula is retained. George Osborne has pencilled in a further £35 billion in cuts to health spending. As consultant surgeon Philippa Whitford has argued, this means the Scottish Government might be forced to go along the same privatisation route to fill the gap.

But there is a further threat facing the NHS.”

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Kudos is due to the Daily Record today, which has a large and prominent feature about NHS surgeon Dr Philippa Whitford, with whom readers should be familiar. Her message, from a position of knowledge and authority, of the fate awaiting the NHS on both sides of the border is a powerful one and makes a strong case for a Yes vote.

Obviously, that upsets both Labour and the No campaign very much.

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