THE WAY OUT OF A "MARKETISED" NHS IS A REAL PARLIAMENT

24 November 2006

THE WAY OUT OF A "MARKETISED" NHS IS A REAL PARLIAMENT. 

By Edward Spalton                                                                                 25 November 2006.
 
 Every day seems to bring a new story concerning the break up of the NHS and I have to admit that it makes me increasingly angry. Hospitals will soon be expected to start advertising their services to compete with each other as if they were selling soap powder. What a wicked waste of resources!  
 
 We have all given up our afternoon because we care about our health service and rely on it for ourselves and our families. I take it that we all mean to win this fight. To win any battle you need to know the ground you are fighting on and where the enemy is. Anger is quite a good motivator to get us started but a bad advisor for a long term campaign which needs strategy and tactics. We don't want to hold meetings which just make us feel better but do not attack the root causes of the wicked distortion of our public services. As the Americans say, "Don't get mad, get even"

 Just over a month ago I was in parliament talking to MPs. It was the day when a petition with four million signatures had been delivered, concerning the break up of the post office. The central lobby was full of people, putting their case to MPs. "How many of your colleagues" I asked the MPs we were with" have told these petitioners "Sorry, nothing we can do about it. It's all governed by EU Directives on postal services now?"  These MPs, good men I think, looked a bit sheepish and admitted it was very unlikely that any MP had come clean.

Something similar is happening throughout all public services. Even the Inland Revenue has sold off its offices and now rents them back – from a company based in an offshore tax haven actually!
You couldn't make it up, could you?

This Private Finance Initiative all sounds rather complicated, so let's compare it with something many of us have done – buying a house. You go to the bank or building society that offers the lowest rate of interest and best terms, don't you? When the government borrows money, it can always get the best rate of interest because it has all our taxes as security. So why do they go to private financiers who will have to pay a higher rate of interest and then charge  the government  a yet higher rate which will leave a profit above that.  And the margins are enormous, as Ron has pointed out.

It is as if you went not to a building society or bank for your mortgage but to some back street moneylender who would charge you a higher rate, insist on having the sole maintenance contract for, say, twenty years and would still end up with the house belonging to him and not you at the end of the contract. You wouldn't choose to do it that way, would you? Yet this is what the government has done with the NHS, schools and many other public facilities. All the main parties are committed to this way of doing things.

Why have politicians, who are not stupid people, agreed to such a stupid bargain, such a wicked wasteful system, on our behalf and at our expense?  After all, Peter Mandelson did not choose to finance his flat in this way! He went to his pal Robinson the Paymaster General for a loan to cover part of the cost, then he lied to a building society to get a mortgage on the rest.  He was too cute to do a deal as daft as the PFI!

The reason is simple but appears to be far away from the concerns of NHS campaigners, so the connection is often not made. When the Conservative government signed up to the Maastricht treaty, it signed up to all the rules governing the euro, except the actual changeover of the coinage. Among these rules is the "Stability and Growth Pact" which limits new public borrowing to 3% of Gross Domestic Product.  Financing the hospitals, schools and old peoples' homes from the private sector keeps the borrowing off the government's books – so the liability to the tax payer (a much increased liability over time) does not appear as a capital item. It is, as it were "off balance sheet" and out of sight of the EU authorities.

When Enron was found out engaged in this sort of accounting, we very quickly saw the directors of that firm in handcuffs and they have since been sent to jail for long terms. It's not surprising but the government often uses the same firm of accountants!

We have heard eloquent speeches from two doctors, describing how this policy is affecting our NHS and the way that it looks after you and me. It occurred to me that they were describing the symptoms of a disease in our public life – a disease of the body politic, in fact. Now, of course, doctors will treat patients to alleviate the symptoms of a disease but they will tell you that to effect a cure, they must get to the root cause. In this case, I think the doctors have described the symptoms but Ron has given the diagnosis.

A political disease requires a political remedy. There is a remedy – a sovereign remedy indeed. It is called parliament. It is a principle of our system that no parliament can bind its successor. This has been the source of parliament's power to change things to suit changing times.

This was the power by which the NHS itself was created – by MPs elected by and responsible to the people. Given that the leaderships of all the main parties are all committed to the Private Finance Initiative and similar programmes, what can we do?

For the moment MPs have "outsourced" much of their law-making responsibilities to outside bodies. 70% or more of the laws and regulations binding on us are now made in the EU and parliament is a rubber stamp. This is why the party leaderships are all huddling on the so-called "centre ground" of politics. It's the place the EU allows them to be. Now if I were an MP and had given away most of the power to make law, I would probably want to keep quiet about it too – as the MPs did with their petitioners on the Post Office. In the real world, when a job is "outsourced", people lose their jobs, don't they?

But there are MPs from both main parties who want to do a real job in a real parliament, answerable to us and not to foreign institutions in Brussels and Frankfurt. The trouble is that there are also MPs who say that they want to do this but vote the other way, when the whips put the pressure on. We have now devised NOT a mere campaign but a tool to finish the job of restoring national sovereignty.  It is a weapon in the hands of the honest ones and a pitiless exposer of the frauds and cheats who want to do only part of the job of making the nation's laws whilst drawing a full salary and princely pension. IT EXPOSES THE HYPOCRITES WHO CLAIM TO WANT DEMOCRATIC SOVEREIGNTY WHEN SEEKING ELECTION BUT DO THE OPPOSITE WHEN IN PARLIAMENT.

It is called "The British Declaration of Independence" and it is open to candidates of those parties already represented in parliament.  

• It forces MPs and candidates to ACT by linking your votes at a general election to a specific Act of Parliament which will reassert the sovereignty of the people, enabling the reinstatement of public control over our affairs – including sound public finance and control over the NHS.
• It bypasses party leaderships and returns to the basis of democracy – the people. That is the right of British people to make their own laws and to sack their own law makers.
• It allows those who want a democratic self-governing nation to know which candidates are willing to commit themselves in writing to obtain this
• It demands a candidate's signature and ON PAIN OF RESIGNATION
• A specific commitment to voting for a constitutional Bill before parliament
• Which, when passed, will immediately restore our democratic rights as a nation.

CANDIDATES WHO REFUSE TO SIGN are saying that they want full pay for doing less than half a job, leaving decisions on matters like public finance (through the Stability and Growth Pact) to foreign bankers and officials with no responsibility at all to the people of Britain.

THROUGHOUT THIS PARLIAMENT, we will be asking MPs to sign up to their true employers, the people.  MPs from both main parties have already done so. They promise to their electors IRREVOCABLY to vote for the BDI Bill when the time is right and also TO VOTE AGAINST ANY BILL WHICH EXPLICITLY OR IMPLIEDLY REPEALS ANY OF THE PRINCIPLES IN THE DECLARATION.

We will approach your MP one way or another. We ask you to do two things:

1. To register your support on the BDI website. Your name and address will be kept confidential but your post code shows which constituency you are in. By this means, we can say to candidates – look how many votes there are in this for you. This can be very significant in marginal seats! If you are not on the internet, just give me your name, first line of address and post code afterwards.

2. Write phone or visit your MP to say that you will ONLY support a candidate who is signed up through the BDI to do an honest job of work on behalf of you, his employer without bending to the will of any foreign institution.

The pledge contained in the BDI is weapon in the hands of the candidate in the election and in the hands of the elected MP afterwards. If the whips apply pressure for him to vote away more powers to foreign control, he can say "Fine. I've promised my electors that I will resign rather than do that. We can have a by-election on the issue".  That puts everything in the right order. The people in charge of the MPs and the MPs in charge of the government – and the whip gets the job of taking the bad news to Downing Street!

We are not asking you for any money today.  That will all go to defray the costs of this meeting and to support the NHS campaign.

This may seem far away from the vital daily battles, resisting the push towards privatisation of the NHS and other services. We may be able to win some of these battles – for a while – but until we have our own real parliament, answerable only to us and not subject to outside authority, we will not be able to win the war. We will always be trumped by the pretended superior authority of the EU, whether in the Growth and Stability Pact on finance or in the forthcoming Directive on the MARKET in Health Services. Mark well, the EU calls it a market!

So there are just two things we in the British Declaration of Independence want you to do. Register your support ( and that of your friends) on our website and make sure your MP knows that he will not get your vote until he signs up.  The BDI is a way of keeping the people's beady eye on politicians and determining whether they are loyal to you the people or to someone or something else. Please make use of it. It is the only way to a sure final victory in rolling back privatisation.