Labour and Anti-semitism

  When I was an eight year old (over three quarters of a century ago) I first became aware of something of the depth and scope of the mass atrocities which Hitler's regime had conducted against Jewish people. A local cinema was showing a Pathe News item about the liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camp at Belsin. It was the talk of the local mining colliery of Easington in County Durham where I lived. So as I was an only child my parents took me with them to a local cinema, so they could see the Pathe News item that everyone was talking about. But when it came to the news item itself (as a young child) I was made to duck down behind the seat in front of me to avoid seeing the horrors. However, I could still hear the commentary and have come across that terrible coverage many times since then.  

         I finally joined the Labour Party at the age of 21 as a result of a public initiative taken by Manny Shinwell our local Labour M.P. who was of Jewish descent. Two years later I acted as one of his local Election Agents in the 1959 General Election and the following year he gave me a reference which helped me obtain a life-changing place as an adult student at Ruskin College in Oxford. Whilst my parents were still alive my wife and I finally settled in Derbyshire, but we retained good links with Easington and the neighbouring mining Colliery of Shotton where my wife's father also worked as a coal miner. Yet never once in the Labour Party nor in our localities did I ever come across anyone making anti-semitic remark.

   Many years later when I was an MP, my wife and I visited Poland. Shortly after we landed we made a short train journey. I felt distictly uncomfortable wondering if the train line we travelled on had been used by the Nazis to tranship Jews to concentration camps. We visited the area in Warsaw where Jews had been placed in the Getto and then the former concentration camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz. Harrowing experiences never to be forgotten.

  I, therefore, recently made a copy of the 130 page report of the Equality and Human Rights Commission's "Investigation into Anti-semitism in the Labour Party" and have read it twice and since closely examined my underlineings and comments. The findings are very difficult to follow as the points made in its main text need to be checked against items it then covers in seven annexes appearing between pages 102 and 128. Yet many of its claims of anti-semitism in the Labour Party are unsubstaniated and we are just expected to accept them because of their authoritive source. Otherwise the reader needs to pursue further relevant and detailed research of their own. So in practice most readers have just to accept the report's claims as being ex-cathedra statements.

   I can fully appreciate why many people of Jewish decent (but by no means all of them) tend to see criticisms of Isreal as being rather offensive. However, there are also many people of Jewish decent who are strong critics of various actions of the Isreali Government, such as the invasion of Eqypt in 1956 and the occupation of Western Bank.

It is prefectly reasonable that people should criticise the Isreali Government for its above shortcomings and press for a two state solution which gives a significant role for a Palestinian State - whilst clearly avoiding language that is in any way anti-semitic and being conscious of the sensibiities of many people of Jewish decent, especially those who have family and other links with those who were exterminated by the Nazis.

Unfortunately in recent years with the growth of the social media some people now use its faciities to blow ill thought out raspberrys at each other - trying to score cheap points. This has also seemingly fed its way through to a small minority of Labour Party members. So with what was never a significant anti-semitic problem in the past, matters may now have surfaced in a small minority of ill thought out avenues. Such as the following case involving an active member of my former Easington Labour Party, see - https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/labour-activist-who-escaped-expulsion-over-throat-cuttinng-threat-made-other-antisemitic-statement-1.473479.

 These shortcomings are new to me, for in the 63 years since I joined the Labour Party I have never ever face-to-face come cross a single internal anti-semitic utterance. Then as an MP myself from 1987 to 2005 when I often mixed alongside Jeremy Corbyn and others, I never heard any such utterances in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Yet the middle east was at times on the agenda. In fact, Jeremy's stance has always been a clear opposition to anti-semitism, whilst looking for help to the Palestinians. I also shared an office with Ken Livingstone for a few years and found that he was the same. same.

What they have both been accused of since then was no more than their passing clumsyness and should now be dismissed with them both being allowed to clarify their stance. I have dealt with one of the problems which Ken expressed badly here - http://threescoreyearsandten.blogspot.com/2018/05/ . Whilst unfortuneately Jeremy working for a two state solution tended not to criticise some of the extreme views expressed by Hamas, but he cearly did not share these.

Jeremy should be back into the Parliamentary Party. I say this even although I never voted for him to be leader. For I believed that the best tactic for the left was not to grab theoretical control, but to seek to gradually move onto the Labour Front Bench and build for the future - whilst still recognising the urgency of tackling climate change and pursing the needs of many, including our former working class supporters.

 In the Equality and Human Rights Commission's Executive Summary on page 5 of their report they claim to have "carried out an in-depth analysis of a sample of 70 complaint investigation files. We selected 58 of these files out of over 200 complaints indentified in different sources. The remaining 12 were put forward by the Labour Party". But why they decided to examine some of the complaints and not others is not clarified. 18 of the cases they dismiss as only being borderine harassment cases.

    In fact the only cases they examined which they refer to by name are those of Ken Livingstone, Pam Bromley, Naz Shah, Chistine Shawcroft, Chris Williamson and Jeremy Corbyn. Then apart from them dealing with Jeremy at greater length on internal Labour proceedural matters, the reader will still need to turn to outside sources to see just what claims have been made against these people. They are not spelt out in the report. Nor is specific information given about the other 58 individual files they refer to, nor why they were selected out of some 200 complaints. What was the criteria for the Commissions private studies ? 

   I appreciate, however, that the Commission would not wish to quote from what it claims are expression of anti-semitism, for this would spread obnoxius language. But this also places their readers in difficuties. Without at least references to such claims, the Commission's analysis can not be subject to our scrutiny so we can then judge its full significance. Yet we need to assess the situation soundly.

Needed - A Red Wall.

Apologies : At the moment I am experiencing technical problems and I am unable to add photos nor links to click into, nor can I present material in separate paragraphs so I have added rows of dots at what should be the gaps between such paragraphs. ...............,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,........... In Chapter 2 of Steve Rayson's important book “The Fall of the Red Wall” (see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fall-Red-Wall-Labour-represents-ebook/dp/B08C37JNKF)he points out that it is estimated that “about one million Labour voters backed the Conservatives in the 2019 General Election. The majority of these were in traditional Labour seats where an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 transferred their votes directly to the Conservatives”. He goes on to point out that (1) ” the single biggest category of people switching directly from Labour to Conservatives were retired people” no less than 38.8% of them, (2) “ 94% of the people who switched from Labour to Conservative identified as White British”, (3) “79.5 % of Labour to Conservative switchers identified with the Leave side of the EU referendum”,(4) 35 traditional Labour seats such as Bolsover were won by the Conservatives at the last election, (5) yet “Labour had been losing socially conservative, anti-immigration votes for some time...forty percent of this group of voters were lost before Brexit or the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader...between 2005 and 2015 Labour votes declined by 14% in Bolsover...the two regions where Labour support fell the most were the North East and East Midlands”, (6) “There has been a lot of discussion about the dramatic falls in the Labour vote in 2019 and these were undoubtedly significant. However, if we look back over a longer period, we can see that equally significant was the fall in Labour’s vote and the increase in the Conservative vote share over the previous eighteen years. .................................................................... Steve Rayson's book builds upon these important themes and is well worth studying by those with interests in the material I list above. Below I offer a few thoughts of my own............................................................................. Even as late as 1997 Labour was still able to draw significantly from its past working class support, even though the structure of the working class had by then been subject to dramatic changes with the decline of traditional industries such as coal, steel and cotton which hit their communal cohesion. For still in Labour's substanial electoral victory of 1997 these people came out mainly to vote Labour and often in a dramatic way. Travelling around North East Derbyshire where I was the Labour candidate I came across the longest queue of voters I have ever seen – and I have been involved in electoral activity way back since I first obtained the vote in 1957. It was at a solid working class section of Clay Cross early in the morning and was mainly made up of women, often with young children in prams and pushchairs. They could not wait to get rid of a Conservative Government which had come out of the Thatcherite tradition..................................... But Blair's large victory at that election rested also on the fact that he made his appeal to many middle class values. For instance,Dronfield where I live having by then become a rather middle class commuter territory yet it voted roughly 50 % Labour, 25% Liberal and only 25% Tory, But the turnout at the subsequent General Election then fell dramatically mainly due to disillusionment with Blairite practices by a still deprived working class................................. From 1997 Labour (apart from bits and pieces) had no substantial programmes to tackle the wide-ranging problems of job insecurity, no avenues for the provision of accessible decent homes for the needy nor a program for improved access to life-long learning and the opportunities it provides................................ Without generally linking in with working class people and seeking to improve the quality of their lives, Labour allowed others to exploit harmful alternatives....... So rather than directing working class people's attention to the need to reform the European Union via democratic and social improvements, we left the door open for the advocates of Brexit. Then when no credible viewpoint was put forward by Labour on how to tackle working class deprivation many (especially older) white working class people came to believe that it was immigrants and temporary summer workers from the EU who had stolen their job opportunities from them.  A view that is now at its strongest in working class areas where there are actually few from immigrants backgrounds. These make-up many of the Labour seats we lost at the last General Election, often for the first time since before 1945................................. Labour requires programmes which meet the needs of working class people from whatever their ethnic, regional or industrial backgrounds. Then there are universal interests which should be used to draw us all together  - such as the tackling of climate change, overcoming Covid 19 and helping to tackle wide scale international disasters........................................................................... Structuring a Labour Party which will act in ways to seek to tackle such problems is our biggest and most immediate task. At one time we had a Parliamentary Labour Party with a substantial number of people who emerged from Trade Unions and when initially selected as candidates already lived in or near the Constituencies they came to represent. And many Branch and Constituency meetings were full of working class activists. That is a bit different from today's pattern. Yet we need to build out from where we currently stand. But we need to appreciate the depth of the task which confronts us. A united parliamentary party directing its attention to tackling peoples basic national and international needs is essential. It would help if this is firmly on Starmer's agenda.

Avenues Open For Back-Bench MPs

 
 
There are widely different patterns covering the parliamentary and governmental avenues which MPs can pursue to further the interests of their party, their voters, their ideologies or just themselves.  Some MPs are experienced front benchers, others hold only minor supportive roles such as those of Private Parliamentary Secretaries to Government Ministers. Then numbers have only ever been back-benchers - which was my experience for 18 years. Others have outside interests which can shape their parliamentary activities. I will concentrate below on the avenues I knew the best - those for a back-bench MP.  But there will be a big difference in the back door avenues available to different back-benchers. Teresa May as an ex Prime Minister will still be able to make use of her past contacts much better than a new back-bench MP who has only emerged at the last General Election. Below I cover various standard avenues which a normal back-bench MP can pursue. But as I retired from being an MP 15 years ago, some of what I say may now be dated and others might have emerged.


(1)  Subject to the luck of the draw a back-bench MP can submit a question for oral answer at differing Question Times and then follow up the Minister's initial verbal answer to them with a related verbal question of their own. Then there is something of a free shot each week at Business Questions, when MPs without giving prior notice can seek a debate on a topic of their concern. The Government may reject such proposals, but this avenue allows issues to be raised that can be part of the MPs wider political campaigning. Many questions can also be asked for written answers only. But the answers will be restricted to no more than what has been asked (at the most) and can't be used to trawl on an issue. But such answers can be pursued by follow-up questions.

(2)  There are two main traditinal avenues where back-bench MPs can seek their own debates. Towards the end of each day's business in the Commons there is an Adjournment Debate normally totalling 30 Minutes in all. Back Benchers can put in for such debates, submitting their topic. Thursday's topic is selected by the Speaker, the others are drawn by lot. Front-bench spokespersons will respond, with short contributions coming from others if the MP who has obtained the debate agrees. But there is no vote on the issue. There is also an avenue for similar debates over longer periods which are held in Westminster Hall. The back-bencher who has obtained the debate normally concludes it also, after the Minister has replied. More MPs can participate in such debates than in the time available for Adjournment Debates.

(3) MPs can also present petitions to the Commons and make a few remarks about them.

(4) Back bench MPs can also seek to introduce a 10 Minute Rule Bill. If they draw lucky and obtain one, they then get 10 Minutes to put their case. Someone can then speak against their proposal and force a division on it. But if the mover carries the measure they can then announce who its sponsoring MPs are and then get the Bill itself printed. Governments can normally block further progress on such matters by their influence over the parliamentary time-table, but I once pursued a Civil Rights Disabled Persons Bill which was only stopped at its Third Reading and helped force the Conservative Government into carrying its own weak alternative version of the proposal. It helped in that I had a Conservative backer of my Bill -  the current Father of the House.

(5) Back bench MPs can seek the Speaker's permission to hold a question and answers session on a matter of their choice and other MPs can seek to join in  This is known as an Urgent Question.

(6) There are also annual lotteries for back-bench Bills covered on seven or so Friday's. These Bills are formally unwhipped. But Governments (and others) will seek to talk these out if they don't like them. But once they have been subject to a lengthy discussion the mover of such a Bill can then call for a vote to end the debate and if successful move on to seek a further vote to carry its Second Reading. But to succeed in ending the debate the mover needs 100 people in  their lobby. On an early version of my Civil Service Disabled Persons Bill I followed this avenue, but was blocked as I only won by 78-0 although I had John Smith our then leader voting with me.

(7) When a Bill passes its Second Reading it moves to its Committee Stage. On major issues the whole House of Commons will participate in this stage. This then gives MPs the opportunity to introduce amendments. But most Bills move to a separate Committee Stage built pro-rata on the  strength of the relevant Parties in the Commons. Whether a specific back-bencher will make it onto this stage will essentially be in the hands of their front bench, especially the Whips.  

(8) Along with relevant front-benchers, back-bench MPs can also get appointed to Select Committees. Most of these bodies shadow the areas covered by Government Departments. What it is that these Committees then investigate and recommend is of importance and can get fed back into the Commons. Their members can seek to influence the enquiries these bodies will pursue and question those called to face their investigations. When their Select Committee produce a report on an investigation, members have the authority to have their own alternative minority report or suggested  amendments  published. There are also Select Committes who cover areas beyond those of shadowing specific Government Departments. For a period I served on a Members Interests Select Committee which could investigate matters such as whether an MP had violated parliamentary procedures.

(9) Early Day Motions are an avenue whose use is mainly resticted to back-bench MPs only. I have explained how these can be used - click here.

(10) Labour runs numbers of internal committees of its own, most of which shadow the territory covered by differing Government Departments. In my time, back-benchers were expected to join three of these.

(11) The Parliamentary Labour Party meets weekly or so when parliament is sitting, with the opportunity for back-benchers to contribute to debates and to pursue relevant proposals of their own. Although in my experiences it was normally dominated by the leadership.

(12) MPs can also join a range of All Party Groups who can discuss parliamentary and other avenues for pursuing their concerns. Click here.

(13) MPs can also form their own groups. I helped organise a cross-party group for all Derbyshire MPs and another for just Derbyshire Labour MPs. Then I chaired a group mainly attended by non-MPs, who were dedicated to pursuing avenues for peace and reconciliation across the island of Ireland. (14) MPs can also pursue matters outside of governmental and parliamentary avenues. For instance, problems brought to an MP's attention by constituents might need to be pursued via local councils, other non-parliamentary areas of officialdom, private firms and even overseas contacts. On the later, links might be sort through our Foreign Office and then via direct contact with our relevant overseas officials in the Foreign Country concerned. Also a foreign nation's Embassy in this country can be directly contacted, as well as the oversea's Government concerned. (15) In pursuing concerns which go beyond those which are restricted to our internal bounderies, back-bench MPs have a number of avenues open to them. I served on British-Irish Parliamentry Body for MPs from the UK and the Irish Republic, who met in each others nations and also undertook Committee work on a variety of issues. Then there are bodies such as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, which MPs can then draw from in pursuing relevant matters in parliament and with relevant Government Ministers. Of course, it depends on how seriously the MPs concerned pursue these and all the above avenues. (16) As a back-bench MP I found the services of the House of Common's Library to be invaluable. They produce a telling variety of publications covering what are key measures being dealt with by parlianment, these can be discovered here - https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/services/  But then an MP has the extra advantage of being able to obtain information from the Library's specialists. Whenever I was faced with a fresh problem to deal with, I would phone the appropriate expert at the library to discover what the situation was and how I could seek to pursue the matter. Losing this specialist information was the biggest loss I experienced when I packed in as an MP.

(17) After I left parliament a Back-Bench Business Committee was established giving back-bench MPs a further avenue to seek to introduce Common's debates. For its details click here.  (18) Then Back Benchers can, of course, seek meetings with Front Benchers and also raise matters with them as they come across them as they move around parliament or elsewhere. Since I retired as an MP modern techology has advanced considerably. This may have opened up further avenues for back-bench MPs to approach Govenment Ministers, their Departments and others. They now have facebook sites to communicate especially with constituents. Details via my comment box about any areas which need adding to my above list would be most welcome.

 

How a Back-Bench MP can make use of Early Day Motions.

Me as an MP in the Commons
 
   There is a parliamentary avenue open to Members of Parliament known as Early Day Motions (EDMs) which are normally only made use of by back-bench MPs. They are for seeking a parliamentary debate upon a proposal at an early date. Yet although very few of these proposals are then ever scheduled for a parliamentary debate, they can still be used by MPs for a number of helpful purposes.
   An MP (along with those they have initially arranged to support their proposal) can see which other MPs add their signatures in support of their measure. There can be strength in numbers. If a measure gains support from MPs from differing political parties, this can be particularly helpful in seeking parliamentary avenues for the pursuit of a proposal.
   A proposal can also gain support from outside of the Commons from local, regional or national avenues. This can add to the campaigning for a measure.
   Click here for a parliamentary explanation on what EDMs are about.
   The MPs behind an EDM can also use it as the start of a parliamentary campaign of their own. These include (a) putting down an appropriate amendment to a passing piece of legislation and (b) seeking a Ten Minute Rule Bill on the matter, which if carried can open up a legislative avenue for the measure.  Then short of legislative avenues the issue can be raised in the Commons by (c) seeking an Adjournment Debate at the close of a parliamentary day, (d) obtaining a debate in Westminster Hall, (e) referring to the EDM during appropriate parliamentary question times - including the weekly opportunity at Business Questions with the Leader of the House where what you wish to see as coming business can be raised.
   When I first became an MP in 1987 the Commons programme started with the Queen's Speech on 25 June. I had then to put my name in five times to the Speaker before I was called to make my maiden speech on 13 July. So I had in the meantime only limited avenues open to me, such as writing letters to Conservative Government Ministers on matters such as dealing with their need for help over the consequences of an Underground Fire at Callywhite Lane in Dronfield.
   On the 6th July I, therefore, submitted my first EDM which gained the support of 46 fellow MPs mainly from South Yorkshire and the North Midlands and was entitled "Underground Fire in Derbyshire". It said "That this House calls on the Secretary of State for the Environment  to take immediate arrangements to meet a deputation from the firms, councils and trade unions directly effected by the underground fire burning on Callywhite Lane Industrial Estate in Dronfield, Derbyshire to discuss ways and means by which his Department will assist in overcoming this emergency, and to report to this House on the outcome of these discussions."
   Whilst the EDM needed my back-up via other avenues, the meeting I proposed eventually took place. Without achieving everything we were looking for it opened up some avenues of Government assistance. The parliamentary pressures I added to the EDM included an Adjournment Debate on the topic and a 10 Minute "Underground Fires Bill" which was started in the Commons and then published, but whose further progress was then blocked by the Government.
   Unfortuneately, I hold no full record of all the EDMs I submitted or supported in my first two years in parliament. But details of those EDMs I submitted and supported in my next 16 years can be found by clicking here.   It shows that over that time I proposed 503 EDMs of my own and supported 12,010 submitted by fellow MPs.
   The seat I represented in parliament was North East Derbyshire. It now has a Conservative MP called Lee Rowley who has represented us for 3 years. In that time he has not submitted a single  EDM of his own. Then in total he has only ever signed a single EDM submitted by another MP. This is an extreme pro-Brexit proposal (click here) submitted by a Tory MP Bill Cash whom I opposed year in and year out when I was an MP.
    At one time Cash chaired the European Union Select Committee which I served upon. He was my least favourite Tory MP and that is saying something.
   Why except during a divide in the Parliamentary Conservative Party over Brexit has Lee Rowley not ever made use of the EDM proceedure ? For whilst it is not the most telling of parliamentary avenues on its own, it is very easy for MPs to pursue. When they turn up in a morning they can collect the day's Parliamentary documents. They can easily then look at any new EDMs which are included. Signing those they agree with. Then writing any amendments they would like and drafting any new EDM they wish. Then they merely need to pop down a corridor to hand material into the Speakers Office for future publications. All an MP needs are ideas, concerns and principles. We then know much more about them - where we agree and disagree.
    Lee Rowley MP in the Commons

75 Years Ago Today - My Introduction to Party Politics

 
The area from which I first saw Shinwell's election poster in 1945. The posters I refer to were, however, then behind the photographer's position.

   After the end of the war against Germany, Parliament was dissolved on 15th June 1945 in preparation for the 1945 General Election which took place on 5th July. The count and the declaration of the result did not, however, occur until 26th July as the armed forces vote had to be collected in and distributed to their appropriate constituencies. At the time we were still at war with Japan.
   On what I judge to be Monday 18th June of that year (exactly 75 years ago today) I gained my first understanding that something rather special was taking place. For as an 8 year old leaving for home from my Junior School, I ran up a side street when I suddenly stopped on seeing a poster stuck on a wooden lamp post ahead of me on the other side of Easington's main road called Seaside Lane. It was unusual to see posters in those days apart from those outside the local cinemas.
   The poster which gained my attention said "Vote for Shinwell" who was the local Labour parliamentary candidate. It was printed in green, which were Labours colours at that time in the North East. As I next walked home along Seaside Lane most of the lamposts had the same poster stuck on them. Then there was a single larger poster on a board attached to railings. It did not merely say "Vote for Shinwell" but it warned us of the dangers of Winston Churchill, Brenden Bracken (the First Lord of the Admiralty) and other Tories being returned to office.
    I had come across something that was unthinkable and exciting. Our war-time hero who had seemingly led us to Victory in Europe and a wonderful street party to celebrate the achievement, was now under attack.
    More drama followed. Shinwell's election address was delivered - again when I was then at school. When I got home every house on our Council Estate seemed to have a copy placed in its front window. Including our house and where my Grandmother and Uncle Bill lived four doors away.  
    It was time for me to start reading our Daily Herald and Reynolds News to see what was going on. Then on a radio political broadcast Churchill claimed that our mild Labour Leader Clem Attlee would preside over a new form of Gestapo. I was offended, Churchill seemed to be saying that places such as Easington were full of Nazis; rather than pigeon fanciers, methodists and fathers in flat caps making their way to Workingmens ' Clubs. Did he not know that Dennis Donnini whose father ran the ice-cream shop on Seaside Lane had just been given a posthumous Victoria Cross ?
   In the General Election, Shinwell obtained a massive 32,257 majority and everyone I came across seemed to be Labour. So was I. Initially it was mainly tribal loyalty.  But this came to be deepened by some of the initial achievements of the 1945 Labour Government, then by developing socialist concerns about the needs to transcend Gaitskellism.
   But the siting of that 1945 poster was the start of my commitment to socialism.

The above is an adjusted version of the start of an article I wrote for the Journal of the North East Labour History Society in its Volume 48 2017. I have, however, corrected what I then said about Churchill claiming that Labour would have Gestapo-type tendancies. He made the claim in a radio and not a cinema presentation.     

Dominic Cummings and Goings

  

Dominic Cummings decision to drive his wife and their four year old son from their home in London to a separate property in Durham in order to overcome and protect themselves from Covid 19 was and remains incomprehensible. For his home is a property in London where they could always have self-isolated themselves, yet still have been in easy reach of medical help and any other assistance that was needed.
    It was not that they did not have anyone to turn to for help or advice. For even when Boris Johnson was in St. Thomas's hospital with the virus, Cummings still had sound links and connections with key members of the Cabinet. Sorting out help could not have been easier for a person in his position. 
   The fact that he then took his wife and son on a trip from Durham to Barnard Castle so he could test to see if his eyesight had been damaged by the virus is even more astonishing. What if he had found that his eyes had actually been effected ? And what if he had only discovered the problem after bumping into another car or injuring a pedestrian ?
    There are easier ways of testing your eyes than by driving a car.  Even just sitting in the driver's seat and having a look through the windscreen can be added to a standard form of eye test.
    The Government had instructed people that for two weeks after experiencing coronavisis they should not travel, even at the cost of missing the passing and the funerals of loved ones. People who followed these requirements must be gutted by Dominic's actions for his wife had Covid 19 symptoms. 
   In a long and rambling article on his facebook site my local Conservative MP Lee Rowley comes up with this very inappropriate conclusion -
" based on what I know, I’m not going to condemn Dominic for wrestling with the guidance and trying to work out what to do his best in difficult circumstances."    
   I appreciate that many people will have needed to make difficult choices recently over their Covid 19 experiences. But Dominic isn't just a normal person, he could have sorted out and turned to many in a key position for advice and have stuck with the Government's guide lines.  His failure to do this is a clear matter for his dismissal from his Government post or for his resignation.

Click here for a useful source of information. 

Hilary Cave on what the Pandemic tells us about our NHS

  Hilary Cave has produced a fine article entitled "The Covid pandemic and health". Whilst it recognises the fine work undertaken by NHS staff in tackling the plight of those hit by the pandemic, she fully reveals the massive shortcomings in current NHS staffing arrangements and in its scope of operations where "Over the last ten years the UK has lost 100,000 doctors and nurses, together with 17000 beds". She deals with the avenues which are needed to overcome such damaging shortcomings and reaches the following conclusion -
   "Poverty is the factor most closely reflected in the health of the people. We already know that people have many fewer years of good health, and much earlier ages of death, in poorer areas. The more lethal toll of Covid19 on poor areas is absolutely in line with what has been going on for a long time. If a government slashes benefits; if it reduces migrants and many workers to homelessness and destitution; if it allows zero-hours contracts and other abuses of human rights, then this is the result. The only good thing to be said for this newly-publicised situation is that it may force more of us to confront the terrible inequalities that have existed for a long time. We need now to work out how to step up our campaign for a fairer, more equal society. If we are to defend the NHS in order to protect and improve the health of our people, we must take action to bring about radical change."
   The full article is some 6,000 words long and can be found below. It is well worth reading, absorbing and supporting.

Updated 11 p.m. 17 May 2020

The Covid 19 pandemic crisis and health

Inadequate funding over a long period

Across Europe and the world, many right-wing parties or dictators have gained power. In Europe it appears that neo-liberalism has led many governments, like ours, to neglect their health services in order to spend less. In the United States President Trump, egged on by wealthy health insurance companies, has declared the idea of even modest forms of state insurance for healthcare to be a dangerous threat to American liberties. Consequently the US population has some of the worst health outcomes in the world across a range of measures, despite living in the world’s wealthiest country.

Early in its life our NHS provided convalescent beds for adults and children. Later on community hospitals were developed, but over the last few years these have been systematically closed down. Over the last ten years the UK has lost 100,000 doctors and nurses, together with 17000 beds. The overall UK shortage of nurses and doctors was already an enormous problem before the pandemic. Another austerity policy, the scrapping of nurse training bursaries, has contributed greatly to this problem. Following public pressure, the supposed remedy of introduction by Government of a student nurse loan scheme to cover only part of a student’s costs, was never going to repair that damage. In Derbyshire the CCGs worked for several years to cut 523 hospital beds in both acute and community hospitals. Much more recently, after a great deal of damage had been done, NHS England admitted that these bed cuts had gone too far.

Since 2005 our Government’s National Security Risk Assessment Committee has been categorising an epidemic as the top threat that faced our country, along with natural disasters such as flooding. The nuclear war threat was graded time after time as a lower risk. Blair boasted in 2005 that the World Health Organisation (WHO) had recognised the UK as one of the better nations in preparing for a pandemic. How have we sunk from a country well-prepared for epidemics into one that has failed conspicuously in this pandemic, having what may be the highest death rate in Europe?

In general, the Coalition Government from 2010, and every Conservative administration since, have systematically starved the NHS of the funding required to keep up with the needs of our increasingly elderly population as well as technological and pharmacological advances in medical care. We now have fewer hospital beds than similar countries, but continue to expend vast sums on weapons of war. Lack of funding has not been the only cause of our poor performance, though.

Legal and structural changes: 2012 Health and Social Care Act

During the decades straddling the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty first centuries, various governments had encouraged private companies to enter the field of healthcare.sThis process was accelerated dramatically during the period of Coalition by the 2012 Act, authored by the Conservatives’ Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health. The 2012 Act established Public Health England (PHE) as a new executive agency of the Department of Health. Executive agencies are distinct from their departments, having their own budgets and managements. Some observers say agencies have proved more responsive, while others think they produce gaps between policy and its delivery. Whichever view is more accurate, a Government Agency seems less accountable than a Department whose minister is answerable to Parliament.

This Act created the biggest change in our NHS since its inception in 1948. For the first time the Secretary of State was not obliged to provide for the health of citizens. The new structure abolished primary care trusts and strategic health authorities, establishing instead clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) covering much larger areas. Although ostensibly giving power to GPs, according to the Co-chair of the NHS Consultants’ Association, CCGs would provide a major point of access for private providers. After comparing the new structures with academic studies of privatisation, he concluded that privatisation would be an inevitable consequence of the Act. Although Lansley dismissed such views as “ludicrous scaremongering”, we can see the advance of privatisation up and down the country. The 2012 Act obliged CCGs to make their commissioned services open to tendering, so enabling private companies to provide services. This has fragmented the NHS. Even some NHS service providers have set up wholly-owned companies in order to save money. One of the factors in this process is the unfair rule that forces NHS to pay VAT while private companies do not. For instance cleaners, porters, and security staff at Chesterfield Royal Hospital no longer work for the NHS, but for a private company that is already employing new starters on inferior terms and conditions.

In theory, the NHS long-term Plan issued in 2019 is said to mark official abandonment of the policy of competition in NHS England. However, it does not prevent private providers being given contracts: it merely does not force this to happen. NHS England, now merged with NHS Improvement, seems to be on a zigzag course, though: behind the scenes it has teamed up with NHS Shared Business Services (SBS), inviting companies to tender for an NHS “framework contract”. Through this mechanism, trusts can then buy in services without going through a full procurement process. John Lister has described this as “batch privatisation”, fearing that whole units or services delivering patient care might be quickly outsourced in this way. In recent weeks ministers have begun to use special powers to bypass even normal tendering patterns. Contracts have been awarded to private companies and management consultants without open competition. Serco and G4S will apparently undertake much of the contact-tracing work, recruiting 15000 call-centre staff, with plans to offer them a whole day of training before starting work. Yet Serco had previously been fined nearly £23 million as part of a settlement with the Serious Fraud Office. It and G4S had been accused of billing the Government for electronic tagging of offenders when some were dead, some were in prison and some had left the country. Presumably the firms accepted their wrongdoing, or they would not have agreed to pay the fines without a court hearing.Deloitte, Sodexo, KPMG and other giants now have contracts for running drive-in testing centres, purchasing PPE, and building the Nightingale Hospitals. At the London Nightingale, services such as cleaning are provided by private companies, who will presumably sack their workers now the hospital is being mothballed. Capita is running the vetting service for retired doctors volunteering to return.

The PPE debacle

Between 2008 and 2011 funding for stockpiled goods in case of emergencies was increased, but since 2013 the value of our stockpiles has fallen. As such goods deteriorate over time, they need replacement. Between 2016 and 2019 the stockpile value fell by more than £200million. A Departmental spokesperson said that this did not represent a drop in stock held, suggesting that efficiencies were responsible for this.

Now that the COVID 19 pandemic is wreaking such a toll on lives, livelihoods and living conditions, there is a general agreement among commentators and many politicians that some sort of inquiry will be needed at a later date about how Government and public services performed during the crisis. As we endure bereavements and the impossibility of living normal lives, more and more voters may come to realise how seriously the NHS has been starved of resources since 2010. In 2016 a three-day epidemic simulation, Exercise Cygnus, was carried out here. Although that uncovered a critical shortage of PPE, critical care beds and morgue capacity, these shortcomings were not addressed. Its full report has not been published by Government, despite Freedom of Information requests to do so. Government has admitted that, although warned in 2019 that gowns were missing from epidemic stockpiles, they did not address this issue.

More recently the Government missed out on the opportunity to join the EU-wide attempt to bulk-buy ventilators because they wanted no part of any EU initiative. When that leaked out and was badly-received by commentators, a new explanation was offered: there was said to have been some confusion over an email, causing an inadvertent missing of the deadline for agreeing to join this process. On April 21 2020 a very senior civil servant told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee that in fact the decision not to opt in to this particular purchasing initiative had been made on political grounds. Yet before the day was out that same civil servant issued a letter saying that his previous statement had been wrong: it had not in fact been a political decision. For a senior civil servant to have issued two mutually exclusive statements within a few hours is probably unprecedented. Was he pressured in some way? On the following day, April 22, EU spokespersons declared themselves “astounded” by our Government’s explanation of an email gone astray as the reason we had not joined that procurement scheme. The saga continues.

Department of Health has sent a letter instructing NHS provider trusts to stop purchasing their own Personal protective Equipment (PPE,) ventilators and some other items, as these will now be procured centrally. This was originally supposed to be happening through the Department’s central procuring system, but as that system was failing abysmally, hospital procurement managers felt obliged to begin sourcing PPE themselves. The situation is therefore very confused. An observer said that the NHS central team do not know what the hospitals are doing; the Cabinet Office team do not know what the NHS is doing; and the army, brought in to help with logistics, are tearing their hair out. One procurement manager has blamed NHS Supply Chain Co-ordination Ltd, a company owned by the Department of Health. This has been managing procurement of goods for NHS. Apparently it had no previous experience of procuring goods from overseas. At the end of March, the body representing health procurement professionals discovered for the first time that gowns to protect health staff had not been included in PPE stockpiles. Deloitte seems likely to be given the task of centralised procurement of PPE.

Tony O’Sullivan, retired paediatrician and co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) has stated that the crisis has highlighted a decade of underfunding for the NHS. He added that centralising decision-making while outsourcing to private companies such huge responsibilities for the safety of our people is simply adding to the mistakes the Government has already made.

Private hospitals

John Lister has suggested that in future some larger private hospitals situated near NHS hospitals might be nationalised to create extra capacity. Private hospitals have often benefited from long NHS waiting times for elective surgery, while they also rely on affluent patients travelling from abroad in order to access healthcare in Britain. As elective operations have been suspended for now, and as overseas travel is difficult or impossible, these hospitals were facing lean times. There is no need to weep for them: the cavalry has arrived. The Government has not requisitioned, but commissioned, 8000 private hospital beds at an estimated rate of £300 per bed per day. In an agreement reached in March, 20,000 nurses and 700 doctors have also been taken over “at cost” for at least 14 weeks. As £1 million per annum is not unusually high pay for a Chief Executive of privately-owned hospitals, NHS campaigners may feel uneasy about such large sums of public money going into deep private pockets. All is well, though, as the Chief Executive of Spire Healthcare will for the next three months receive 20% less than his usual annual salary of £1million per annum. There will be limits on shareholders’ dividends too, but only for the duration of the deal. No wonder this private sector rescue package has caused the price of Spire shares to surge on the London Stock Exchange.

Other concerns about privatisation are international in scope. The Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that £13.4 billion of historic NHS debt will be wiped out. This sounds reassuring until we place it in the context of current trade talks with USA. Although Johnson had promised that the NHS will not be on the table at these talks, two sources of information give cause for concern. Firstly, the newly-published UK document dealing with our approach to the trade talks does not appear to protect the NHS. Secondly, the US, among other aims, wants to secure an agreement that will force us to pay as high a price for their drugs as the Americans themselves pay. This will cost us a great deal more. The US documents appear to state that there will be court jurisdiction over foreign state-owned enterprises that interfere commercially with the interests of American corporations. Could Johnson be trying to tempt the US into starting to allow their private companies to take over some of our NHS services by offering up an NHS that is newly freed of debt?

Scientific advice

Throughout this crisis, government ministers have maintained that they are “following the science”, as though there is a single scientific opinion. Government relies on the Scientific Advisory Group (SAGE). Journalists’ investigations have revealed that 13 of the 23 known SAGE participants are paid employees of Government, including the Prime Minister’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings. No minutes of these meetings are published. There is concern that supposedly objective scientific opinion may be being influenced by political considerations. Other experts too are concerned about SAGE and possible political influence. Prof. Sir David King, a former Chief Scientific Adviser to government, has set up a panel to act as an independent alternative to SAGE. It will broadcast live on YouTube, taking evidence from global experts, and will formally submit its recommendations to the Health and Social Care Select Committee of the House of Commons. Prof. King is worried that the Government might take us out of lockdown too early, so risking a second peak of infection.

There are other concerns about SAGE, too, according to Prof. Anthony Costello, a former WHO Director, now Professor of Global Health at University College London. He considers that SAGE lacks expertise in public health, primary care and intensive care. The official SAGE committee comprises 16 men and 7 women, with only one ethnic minority person. Community testing and contact tracing were apparently not included in decision-making about possible choice of strategies by the committee because not enough tests were available. PHE stopped testing on 12 March, apparently because of lack of capacity, not least in contact-tracing. Public health specialists were surprised by this abandonment of WHO advice to test, trace and isolate in order to get the pandemic under control. The huge Cheltenham horse-racing festival took place while WHO was urging governments to promote social distancing as early as possible. Local Authorities in England already have Environmental Health Officers who are trained in contact-tracing, yet a parallel centralised system was created. Costello has argued that Local Authority expertise and capacity should have been brought in for contact tracing. One nurse who responded to the call for people to step forward so they could be trained as contact tracers has complained to national news channels that the online system has not allowed her to book in for training, nor have her phone calls received any useful response. The centralised system seems to be in chaos. Sir David King’s independent SAGE group issued a statement on May 12 urging Government to move to decentralised testing, tracing and isolating across the UK, rather than the centralised testing alone, which was heavily reliant on the private sector.

Independent SAGE argued that the latest Government “Stay alert” message was unclear, while “Control the virus” was an empty slogan. Their report went on to predict that Government strategy would result in a more rapid return of local epidemics, causing more deaths and possible further national or partial lockdowns. On 16 April government figures seemed to show a slight increase in infections. Prof. David Hunter, an Oxford epidemiologist, made this point too. He pointed out that countries which had successfully tackled the virus had all focused on test, trace and isolate. He and other experts have noted that GPs have not been enlisted to play a key part in combating the virus either, as NHS 111has been made the contact for people who may have the illness. This means that the knowledge held by GPs of their local areas is not being used.

Poor Government performance

Allyson Pollock and Peter Roderick maintain that testing, contact tracing and purchasing of equipment, all classic public health measures for controlling communicable disease, should be handled through regional authorities rather than central government. Responsibility for public health, together with staff, and budgets that were not ring-fenced, had been passed from NHS to local authorities.

Public health then suffered its share of budget cuts, as local authorities lost 49.1% of their funding in real terms between 2010 and 2018. Public Health England (PHE) reduced its budget by £500m over five years in “efficiency savings”. It is not clear whether this was forced by Government. Prof. Carl Heneghan, Director of Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, insisted that we have to invest, to create over-capacity that will be required in times of crisis. “We’ve already cut to the bone in this country far too much.”

Testing for the virus was almost unobtainable at first, then difficult, as NHS workers with symptoms were expected to undertake long drives after lengthy shifts. Because of public criticism, Matt Hancock promised large numbers of tests would be available daily. Although as April ended it was claimed that the target had been reached on time, it has not been reached in succeeding days. The First Minister for Wales has pointed out that targets should be integrated into a plan for how to use the results to improve the situation: testing is not an end in itself. Finally testing has been opened up to workers in social care and to care home residents, some of whom have died of the virus.

Some hospital patients are being discharged into nursing or care homes, usually privately-owned. These homes are being starved of protective equipment and are full of frail elderly residents: a group known to be particularly vulnerable to the virus. The latest figures, probably an underestimate, indicate 2400 deaths from Corona virus in care homes each week. Dying people in care homes and hospitals are often of necessity being separated from their loved ones, even in their last moments of life. For the dying person it must be agonising to go without loved ones by their side. For families, the pain of bereavement is compounded by these circumstances, as bereaved people often find some comfort in being present at the death of their loved one. A prime duty of any government is to keep its people safe. During a pandemic this is not always possible, but years of cost-cutting; moves towards smaller government and more privatisation, leading to more fragmentation in the health service; together with Government bungling, have vastly increased the number of deaths.

Despite Johnson’s claim that we have passed the peak of infection, that is not true for care homes. Just think how useful community hospitals would have been in the current situation, had there not been determined action to close them down. Some community hospitals such as Bolsover, owned by Derbyshire Community Health Service, have been sold off with their land, at a time when draconian measures were being taken by the CCG to reduce expenditure. The Bolsover site was sold to Homes England for house-building, following strenuous efforts by Government to “encourage” such sales so that houses subsequently built on former NHS sites would contribute to national Government house-building targets.

Dangerous working practices in the NHS

At the end of April the BBC Panorama programme revealed that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) requires face-covering visors, eye protection, gowns and gloves for those working in a situation with risk of “high-consequence infection”. This clearly relates to health and social care workers in contact with Covid19 patients. However, Government has very recently downgraded Covid19 from that category of “high-consequence infection”, meaning that such personal protective equipment is no longer mandatory. Government claims that SAGE advised the downgrading of Covid19. The Panorama programme maintained that a source (possibly from SAGE?) indicated the scientific advice was “pragmatic” because there are simply not enough items of the correct grade of PPE to fulfil legal requirements. So the lack of PPE is determining legal protection for front-line workers, rather than legal requirements determining what PPE is provided to them. Considering that recent figures show Covid19 patients admitted to hospital are just as likely to die as those admitted during an outbreak of the deadly Ebola, it is hard to imagine an infection of higher consequence than Covid19.

Doctors and nurses, working long shifts in a high-risk situation with personal protection that is often scandalously inadequate, are dying in substantial numbers. Some other healthcare staff are dying too. Quite rightly they are frightened for themselves and their families, and they are angry. Added to that, they are grieving for dead colleagues and for the large number of their patients who are dying. Altogether they are bearing a tremendous physical and psychological burden that may leave them, even if they survive, with post-traumatic stress disorder or other forms of mental ill-health. It is perfectly reasonable to conclude that, despite politicians’ rhetoric, healthcare workers are essentially being treated as though they are disposable. This puts them in a similar position to many manual workers who, over the decades, have been placed in so much danger at work that they die.

Emergency projects

Great acclaim accompanied the rapid building of the first “Nightingale Hospital” in East London, being followed by other facilities around the UK. The London Nightingale has taken only 54 patients. In fact it seems to have been used as a “step down” facility for small numbers of those patients who are starting to improve. London hospitals apparently did not require as much overspill capacity as had been expected, possibly because of staff ingenuity and adaptation. Now the Nightingale is to be mothballed, along with other Nightingale facilities. As the Nightingale’s support services such as cleaning are being supplied by private companies, it seems likely that those workers, hailed as heroes by Government ministers, will now be sacked. Some of the other Nightingale facilities have never been used.

Health and social care

The NHS should not be viewed in isolation from the field of social and nursing care, which is now a patchwork of providers dominated by the private sector. The crisis in social care, together with the unfairness of NHS funding for some, but not all, residents of care homes, has remained unaddressed for many years, despite promises from a string of Prime Ministers. Many of the private care homes form part of large chains that are in turn owned by private equity funds. These funds exist solely to produce profits. Therefore they remove money from the care home chains; often taking ownership of the buildings, then charging high rents, thus saddling the homes with large debts. As less and less public money, in real terms, is being paid by Local Authorities for care costs, this process sank the Southern Cross chain of homes a few years ago. That forced disruption, and possibly earlier death, on many confused, frail elderly residents. The Four Seasons chain is currently thought to be in similar danger.

Dan Poulter, a Tory ex-minister of health who is also a practising NHS psychiatrist, has recently argued in a newspaper article that health and social care should be integrated through a single commissioning model, with social care, like health, free at the point of need. Many NHS campaigners might want to jettison that commissioning model, with its private firms and its overload of NHS accountants and managers, in order to revert to a simpler structure of publicly-owned and controlled direct health provision. Still, Poulter’s call is one indicator of pressure for change that might beset our government in the near future.

In April 2020 public anger is growing as we become increasingly aware of the lack of Government attention and concern for the social and residential care sector. There is extreme concern about the fact that one third of COVID 19 deaths are happening within the social care sector. The dead include both residents, who are not being counted accurately, and care workers who, like NHS workers, are being starved of protective equipment. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has now published data showing that healthcare workers have not had a higher death rate than the general population. However, social care workers have had significantly higher rates of Covid 19 deaths than the general population: 23.4 male deaths and 9.6 female deaths per 100,000.

Varying death tolls in different communities

The dramatically large proportion of deceased health staff from black and minority ethnic groups needs objective investigation. Although the causes are probably much more complex than a straightforward cause and effect relationship with racism, we might remember that our Prime Minister described black children in a newspaper article as “piccaninnies with water-melon smiles”. As he refused to apologise, his attitude does not inspire confidence that the possible role of racism as part of the present carnage will be dealt with in a proactive way once the results of investigations require remedial action.

Many people have been shocked by the dramatic disparities in COVID 19 death rates. People in the poorest areas are dying at twice the rate of those in affluent areas. While deplorable, this is exactly in line with facts well-known for years: that the inequalities in our society are literally deadly. The last Labour Governments required the NHS to tackle health inequalities. Today, while Public Health England espouses this aim, many Government policies work in the opposite direction, increasing inequality.

There has been a great deal of research, with a variety of models constructed to show many factors that are determinants of health: housing and the built environment, clean air and water, good food rather than hunger, social or family networks and so on. (We now know that higher levels of air pollution seem to be linked to higher rates of death from Covid 19.) Personal behaviour is not necessarily at the forefront of this range of health determinants. Poverty is the factor most closely reflected in the health of the people. We already know that people have many fewer years of good health, and much earlier ages of death, in poorer areas. The more lethal toll of Covid19 on poor areas is absolutely in line with what has been going on for a long time. If a government slashes benefits; if it reduces migrants and many workers to homelessness and destitution; if it allows zero-hours contracts and other abuses of human rights, then this is the result. The only good thing to be said for this newly-publicised situation is that it may force more of us to confront the terrible inequalities that have existed for a long time. We need now to work out how to step up our campaign for a fairer, more equal society. If we are to defend the NHS in order to protect and improve the health of our people, we must take action to bring about radical change.

Sources

Various informal discussions

Financial Times

Full Facts website

Government websites

Guardian

Health Campaigns Together

Morning Star

Observer

Private Eye

Wikipedia