Get the facts from Keep Campaigns are fighting back against cuts, closures and privatisation across the country: and one source which offers links to many local campaigns, a searchable archive of up to date information culled from the local and national press, background briefing material, campaign advice and much more is the Keep Our NHS Public website. KONP urgently needs funds to resource its campaigning activity and research into the new year. Make sure you and your organisation sign up, affiliate, and help build the campaign.
www.keepournhspublic.com Andrew Johnson It might have seemed a good idea for Tony Blair to throw his weight behind those ministers and NHS managers forcing through cutbacks and closures in local services in the name of "modernisation" and "centralising" specialist services.
It is clear that his intervention along these lines at the beginning of December, following on similar hard-line speeches from Patricia Hewitt and from other health ministers, and the PLP briefing notes issued to MPs for the November 1 lobby of parliament, was intended to stiffen the line of local Labour MPs and swing them in support of government policy.
Many MPs had already shown themselves to be almost unbelievably servile and ready to defend Blair's reforms regardless of the level of local popular anger.
A UNISON demonstration through Nottingham last autumn against job losses and service cuts, in a city where NHS deficits total £60m, was unable to secure the support of a single local Labour MP - all of them balking at one line in UNISON's leaflet which talked of the "NHS on its knees".
But others have been more willing to face up to local political realities. In NE London where the fight against cuts at Whipps Cross Hospital and local community health services has enlisted an unlikely champion in lain Duncan-Smith, local Labour MPs Harry Cohen and Neil Gerrard have consistently offered active support.
But this involvement is the exception rather than the rule: one-time left winger Dennis Skinner, for example has failed to lift a finger in the campaign against privatisation of GP services in a pit village in the middle of his own constituency.
So it has come as something of a surprise to find Labour Chair Hazel Blears among those protesting and picketing in her Salford constituency against the run-down and closure of local maternity and children's services - a policy driven by Hewitt and the NHS bureaucracy, and only recently rubber-stamped by the Strategic Health Authority.
Near by, another prominent Blairite, Bury MP Ivan Lewis, a junior health minister ramming through the same policies up and down England, and arrogantly A UNISON dismissing
demonstration lobbyers objections on in Nottingham November 1
last autumn (urging those who disagreed to "go was unable to and vote Tory) is secure the also reported to
support of a have backed opposition to the single local same Greater
Labour MP Manchester plans, which would also close obstetric, neonatal and paediatric in-patient services in his constituency's Fairfield hospital.
North of the border, Home Secretary John Reid some time ago prominently joined in a local campaign to defend his constituency's maternity and other services against cuts being driven through by his party colleagues in the Scottish Parliament.
On first glance these leading Blairites are - as Blears claimed - taking a bold stand and responding to local constituents.
But on closer examination
they are guilty of hypocrisy of the worst kind: while remaining part of the New Labour machine which is forcing home cuts in other constituencies across the country, and telling other MPs to back the government in defiance of local opinion, they seek to save their own political skins by jumping aboard bandwagon campaigns defending popular local services. If they were serious or consistent in their approach they would not only oppose and dissociate from government policy, but urge other Labour MPs to join them in a campaign for a change of course.
Campaigners should not be rejecting the support of local MPs and councillors, regardless of their political affiliation - on the contrary they should be pressing for as many Labour MPs as possible to join the protests - but also to find other ways to maximise the pressure on Hewitt, who has always known the closures would be hard to sell at local level.
After all, in many cases it will be local Labour MPs who will deservedly face the dole queue after the next election if they allow ministers to press on down this crazy path.
But however weak her stand, it is ironic that Blears as Labour Party national chair has shown more willingness to stand up for local services than the national leaders of the Party's biggest trade union affiliate, UNISON, who have once again capitulated to New Labour pressure and pulled back from the brink of endorsing a national demonstration in defence of the NHS, and opted instead for a low-key "Day of Action" on March 3.
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anoin:Editorial Widespread revulsion at sectarian lynching of one-time US ally SADDAM EXECUTION BACKFIRES If anything was needed, at the end of 2006, to demonstrate the depravity generated by Bush and Blair's so-called "war on terror" the squalid sectarian lynching of Saddam Hussein in the name of victor's justice fitted the bill.
Like the trial itself where Saddam stood accused of crimes against humanity most of which he committed whilst he enjoyed the full backing of Britain and the USA, it was choreographed to the propaganda requirements of George W Bush, who had decided that he wanted Saddam dead before the end of the year as a Like a video clip from a lowrent awards ceremony, Tony Blair's "I can't be with you" New Year greetings from the luxurious Miami residence of BeeGee Robin Gibb seemed almost deliberately designed to annoy and embarrass Gordon Brown.
Blair's injunction that his favoured successor must cling to the "reform" policies that have alienated public opinion and public sector workers will be as popular with the Chancellor as a slice of last year's turkey.
But in one respect Blair seems to have hit the nail on the head: just as Thatcher shifted the political landscape in Britain, opening up new views to the right and making neoliberalism the norm, Blair's decade in office has built further on the same foundation - forcing his mainstream opponents as well as many of his toadying supporters to embrace essentially the same quest for a "centre ground".
Hence the emergence of David Cameron and the laborious process of counter-weight to the deluge of disastrous news coming out of Iraq.
Indeed December 2006 had broken all records as far as civilian Iraqi deaths were concerned again undermining the sick pretence that Iraq is not in a state of civil war. At the same time the number of US troops killed in action passed the 3,000 mark. The idea that the killing OI Saddam Hussein will have a positive effect on this situation is a complete delusion.
In a glimpse of the depths to which his administration has sunk the President of the United States announced that this grotesque spectacle of the remodelling the Tory Party to shed its accurate but unflattering image as a party for wealthy septuageniarans, seaside landladies, yuppies and stockbrokers and xenophobes of all varieties.
Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Blair's recent years has been to open the door to this rehabilitation of a Party that under Hague,
The Tories Dunkin' Doughnuts and Howard are now appeared to be all leading in but dead and buried - and create a scenario in which polls Cameron can appear as an enlightened and forwardlooking politician rather than a desperate and unprincipled toff casting round for votes as his Party's core support dies of old age.
Now, with Blair's help, it's consistently the Tories who lead in the opinion polls - and astonishingly the Tories who even lead on the issue of health policy, which used to be a bedrock issue for Labour.
The miraculous reinvention
11:57:21 execution was in fact "a milestone on the road to Iraqi democracy"
Margaret Beckett, speaking for Blair who was on holiday did no more than restate government policy against the death penalty.
It was quickly apparent that the whole thing was a sectarian operation and would widen the sectarian divide -which, as a calculated assertion of Shia ascendancy and insult to Sunnis on Eid alAdha (feast of the sacrifice) the most holy Muslim feast day, it was always going to do.
The reaction across the Arab world, particularly in the Sunni parts of Iraq and in of Tory policy on health is even more remarkable since in all essentials the Cameron /Lansley policy is virtually identical to that of Blair/Hewitt - favouring private sector involvement, foundation Trusts, etc.
The crucial differences are that unlike New Labour the Tories have been able to paint themselves as less extreme and more concerned with
preserving local services,
and bright enough to put
clear blue water between
themselves and some of the
aspects of the reforms the opinion which have most obviously
turned out as fiascos - even
where, as with the issue of using the ruinously expensive Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to fund new hospitals, the policy was one first hatched up by the Tories themselves in government, and only later stolen by New Labour.
On health the Tories have also enjoyed the luxury of opposing Labour's increased spending on public services, while criticising the continued shortfalls in the system and opposing cuts and closures that Palestine and Jordan, has already demonstrated that this is the case.
The filming of the execution - presumably undertaken on the misplaced assumption that it would produce some humiliating and damaging images of Saddam - and its prompt release onto Iraqi state television, meant that it was in effect a public execution. The hooded thugs who acted as executioners apparently drawn from one of the Shia death squads looked more sinister that Saddam himself, who was clearly aware of the potential impact his last moments could have across the region and conare being brought in to help balance the books.
Cameron - like Arnie Schwarzenegger in California -has also donned the mantle of green policies, flirting with various policies and courting environmentally-conscious voters while failing to offer any firm commitments or conclusions.
On social policy issues, the fanatical and reactionary policies of Blair's team have also helped paint Cameron -burying uncomfortable memories of Michael Howard at the Home Office, the antigay legislation of Section 28 and a host of other reactionary laws and measures - as a liberal-minded alternative somewhere to the left of new Labour.
Indeed with New Labour -cranked up further into paranoid obsession by Blair's ludicrous "war on terror" -standing several leagues to the right of Genghis Khan, it appears that Cameron does hold more enlightened views on law and order ('hug a hoodie) and even immigration ducted himself accordingly.
Some Shia factions celebrated his death. But the crude taunting by the executioners at the point of death and Saddam's robust response strengthened his image across the region amongst his potential supporters and brought them onto the streets..
That Saddam was a tyrant there is no doubt. He rose to power in a ClA-backed coup and once his Baathist party apparatus was installed, like SO many vicious regimes backed by Washington, he was ready to repress, torture and murder opponents from all quarters - whether they be Communists, trade unionists, Kurds, Shiites, critics, or potential rivals.
While presenting himself as the only Arab ally of the Palestinians he showed no concern for the welfare of the peoples of Iraq, happily allowing them to languish or die under UN sanctions and then the full-scale invasion, while cynically promoting the charade of his non-existent "weapons of mass destruction".
But the whole trial was a travesty. It was rigged from and asylum (where his new line chimes in conveniently with the CBI, which is now leading the establishment defence of immigration, arguing that migrants make an important economic contribution).
But appearances can be cruelly deceptive: few of the New Tory policies have yet been formally adopted - most of the changes so far are simply a process of discarding old reactionary solutions already rejected by voters.
Blair and Brown have set out to sever New Labour's roots in the unions and working class and hitched its wagon to neoliberalism, the private sector and the reactionary values of "middle England".
But recognising their bankruptcy does not imply any endorsement of Cameron.
For left opponents of New Labour, a new, socialist alternative is required, loyal to the needs of the working class: whatever other values Cameron may claim to support, we can be sure that these will not be among them. the -OBESCE with judges removed on instructions from the White House, and defence lawyers assassinated and intimidated. In the end it had the atmosphere of a lynch mob. The judge forgot to announce the verdict in his haste to get on to the sentence.
To bring Saddam to justice was impossible in the immediate aftermath of invasion. It required an independent court in a genuinely independent Iraq, or an international tribunal conducting a proper trial - not a stitch-up like this under conditions of foreign occupation.
Meanwhile figures published by the Iraqi Centre for Research 7 and Strategic Studies 80% of all Iraqis, right across the sectarian divide, considered that the situation in Iraq was worse now than before the country was occupied.
It demonstrates once again that the spiral into the hell which is now daily life in Iraq can only be reversed by the ending of the occupation and withdrawing all foreign troops from the country. Brown (top) gets long-distance
instructions from Blair, but
could Cameron cash in?