Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

THEY ARE KILL US, DROTHER HERE NOT JUST PFACE I

Socialist Resistance no49  |  page 7

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

US И them to the NHS at a price over 30-40 years - has hit another period of crisis.

The second wave of PFI hospitals has proved to be massive v more expensive that the first round, which in themselves represented a substantial extra cost for cash-strapped Trusts.

Coventry's £420 million new Walsgrave Hospital, for example has lurched from one crisis to the next since it opened, with management closing beds and axing staff become so tixated on PHI that it is not always good news when a scheme is cancelled: it almost inevitably means that long-promised new hospitals will not be built.

This year has seen unaffordable schemes collapse in Hertfordshire (£300m plus), Leicestershire (£700m plus) and South West London (the proposed replacement for Epsom and St Helier hospitals), leaving only chaos, confusion and Terry Conway There is no question that the family and friends of JeanCharles de Menezes must have been outraged at the hubris of Metropolitan Police Commander lan Blair in refusing to consider his position.

After a prosecution under Health and Safety legislation, the Met were fined £175,000 and ordered to pay £385,000 costs after being convicted by an Old Bailey jury on November 1 of exposing the public to risk. This followed a disgraceful decision last year by the Crown

JEAN CHARLES INNOCENT•.• (IAN) BLAIR MUST GO than a small current of racism which blends with vicious islamaphobia in the whole thing - the unspoken assumption that because Jean-Charles was not white his life was worth less.

So what do Ken Livingstone and the rest of them - including the Green Party's Jenny Jones -think they are doing backing him?

Since when did the left think that more "coppers" on the beat was a good thing? That's the only thing that I can find that Livingstone or Len Duvall, chair 50 SORRY BAdEC of the Metropolitan Police Authority, can cite as the reason to defend him now.

Socialist Resistance and many others didn't call for Tony Blair to resign because we had more faith in Gordon Brown.

We demanded he went because the blood of the Iraqi people on his hands and because of his attacks on working people at home and throughout the globe.

lan Blair has Jean-Charles's blood on his hands.. and he must resign.