Letters to the Evening Standard and the Guardian

I am not altogether surprised that Ian Dale has retired from blogging as the time is not always easy to find. In the last week I have chaired a meeting of the London Ambulance Service Patients Forum, attended a Board meeting of the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust, been speaking outside the Julian Assange bail application hearing at the magistrates court, been at a steering committee meeting of Coalition of Resistance, been interviewed for a new Left blog and done several days work along with attending a string of Xmas dinners and parties. In the meanwhile I managed to put my name to two letters, one on the NHS in the Evening Standard and the other in the Guardian on the cuts. The first was published last Wednesday and the second has gone in today.

Dear Editor, It is shameful that the British Medical Association (BMA) long regarded as a champion of the NHS has decided to cooperate with government plans to radically transform the NHS from a publicly run to a privately run health service. The catastrophic abandonment of the basic principles of the NHS may serve the interests of doctors, but does nothing for patients, the real funders of the NHS.

Most GP practices are small businesses contracted by Primary Care Trusts to provide primary healthcare to the whole population. The government's White Papers on health proposes the NHS budget (our money) is handed over to these businesses to spend on our behalf. This money will pay for nearly all NHS services. This is likely to cause chaos for many years, especially for pan-London services like the London Ambulance Service.

When the BMA say they oppose privatisation, they mean they oppose the take over of small GP businesses by multinational healthcare companies. This is a battle of business models, in which the public will have no discernible voice.

The government and the BMA are colluding to leave the “NHS” as nothing more than a logo or brand with our money disappearing into new GPs consortia and our hospitals to become Foundation Trusts and removed from NHS balance sheet.

Is this what the Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health meant by his now famous and clearly fraudulent statement: Nothing about us without us?

Joseph Healy, Chair, Patients Forum, Ambulance Services, London

Malcolm Alexander, Vice Chair



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Dear Guardian letters


Len McCluskey calls for a "broad strike movement" to stop the coalition's "explicitly ideological" programme of cuts. (‘Unions Warn of Massive Wave of Strikes’, Guardian 19 December 2010) This will happen. Government cuts are decimating education, welfare, health, sports and the arts. We are told that they are as inevitable as the rain; that the only choice we have is between music classes for our kids or care for our elderly. We need both and do not accept that jobs, services and the quality of life have to be jettisoned for the greed of those who are asked to sacrifice nothing. Cutbacks in the arts mean that access will be limited to those who have the money to pay while many who work in the arts will lose their jobs. The closing of public libraries is the most obvious example. They are where literature, art and culture are available to everyone without charge. Some authorities are already selling them off, others are offering them to the ‘consumer’ on the principle of ‘if you want them buy them’. Massive increases in education fees and the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance are part of the same philosophy. Everything that is not immediately of use to the corporate agenda is to be placed on a ‘pay as you go’ principle. Meanwhile funding for theatre, film, music, dance and other arts projects is to return to the Victorian notion of finding patrons, drawn from the people and corporations who have their own agendas of how to define the arts. In the face of those who choose to exercise their power to destroy, we need to create. We urge all those who work in the arts to join us at 'Artists of the Resistance' in opposing the cuts.



Iain Banks, writer

Andy de la Tour, actor

AL Kennedy, writer

Roger Lloyd Pack, actor

Miriam Margolyes, actor

Susie Meszaros, musician

Michael Rosen, author and poet

Martin Rowson, cartoonist

Janet Suzman, actor

Timberlake Wertenbaker, playwright

Shaun Askew, animator

Shabina Aslam, theatre director

Anne Aylor, writer & ballet teacher

Jordan Baseman, video artist

Elizabeth Beech, artistic director,The Phoenix Project

Maria Birmingham, animator

Cecily Bomberg, writer

Sean Bonney, poet

Phil Branston

Stephen Carley, AV artist

Florence Curtis

Karl Benjamin Frankson, artist

Jill Gibbon, artist

Marilyn Halpin

Joseph Hely, disability worker

Simone Hodgson

Camilla Howalt, artist

Angela Jane Kennedy, artist

Fin Kennedy, playwright

Ol'ga Kretz, film-maker

Lucy Lepchani, writer & poet

Fiona MacDonald, opera singer

Mel McCree

Carol Mottershead, dancer

Jane Park

Romayne Phoenix, visual artist

Konstantina Ritsou-Zavolia, author & director

Dee Shaw

Patricia Shrigley, video artist

Patrick Simons, artist

Patrick Snape

Ron Stagg, Museum Association

Rebecca Thorn, musician

Geoff Tibbs

Charlotte Turton, artist

Elizia Volkmann, writer and artist

Michael Walling, artistic director, Border Crossings

Joanne Walker, CoR Tyne & Wear

Debra Watson

David Wilson, publisher

Tom Wood

Jan Woolf, writer

Artists of the Resistance

c/o Coalition of Resistance

Housmans Bookshop

5 Caledonian Road

City of London N1 9DX

T: 07951 579 064

www.coalitionofresistance.org.uk