NEW BLOG SPACE

All my blogs pre-December 2014 you can find here however new blogs you will find on my website at www.fionadentlabour.com/blog  

THE NHS WITH LABOUR IN 2015

 A very informative and lively meeting with LORD PHILIP HUNT in West Windsor tonight (27th November 2014). 

We talked about the mad rush to privatisation that this government is leading, how it is being starved of the support it needs and how Labour can repair the damage if elected in 2015. People came from far and wide to hear him speak and ask questions. Members of the public and Labour members raised difficult issues and carried on talking long after Philip left. A very worthwhile and enjoyable evening! 

UKIP WILL PRIVATISE THE NHS

For a long time now I have been saying beware of UKIP because they want to completely privatise the NHS. You no longer have to take my word for it, here it is from the lips of Nigel Farage

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nigel-farage-caught-camera-admitting-4617184

Please watch this short clip of recent film, taken at a UKIP gathering which explains why OUR NHS is not safe in UKIP's hands.

Do you want your taxes to be spent of shareholder dividends?

Do you want to pay additional private insurance for life saving treatment that is currently universally free at the point of need?

Do you want to end up like US citizens who thought they were insured but had their treatment payments rejected by smart insurance companies?

I do not want any of these things, that is why I am fighting to be heard across Ascot, Windsor, Sunningdale, Binfield and the rest of the constituency. That is why I am offering you a credible alternative.

£34 BILLION of taxes has not been collected from companies and this is just the figure we know about. Labour will collect those unpaid taxes to prevent the further undermining of the NHS and the livelihoods of British citizens.

The Tories and the LibDems have brought our NHS to it's knees by putting the NHS on a fast track to privatisation. UKIP want to finish the job. For the sake of your families please vote Labour in 2015 to stop this madness.

Fiona Dent

Jarrow to Westminster!

On the 16th August 2014 I set off from Jarrow, near Newcastle on a 300 mile march to Westminster. My purpose was to make you and other people around the country aware of the very real damage that is being done to our National Health Service.

My fellow marchers and I walked every day for between 11 and 20 miles. There were no rest days and we spent most nights sleeping on the floors of church halls and community centres. We all had our own very personal reasons why we were willing to put ourselves through this hardship but we were united in our grief for the damage that has already been done to the service that cares for all of us in our hour of need.

In 2010 the NHS was the best it has ever been, waiting lists for treatment had been reduced or wiped out, staff morale was good, you could get a GP appointment within 24 hours, preventative work like smoking cessation and addictions treatment were strong and patient satisfaction was high. In 4 short years that has all changed.

The first piece of damage done was the removal of the gold standard target of being able to see your GP within 48 hours. The reason that this is such an important issue is that a 1 or 2 week delay for the initial diagnosis can mean the difference between receiving effective treatment; annoying enough if you have to suffer longer with a minor ailment but life and death for some cancer patients.

The next Government action was to start the top down NHS reorganisation which they had assured us before the election that they would not do. It cost us, the tax payer, a whopping £3 Billion and it took money away from the what it was meant for ie to pay for doctors, nurses and treatments. This reorganisation has also opened up health commissioning to allow private companies to extract profits and pay shareholders from our hard earned tax contributions. About 6% of NHS services are currently in private ownership but this will become a flood once the Clinical Commissioning Groups have mastered their new role. 2015 will see the first of the new contracts and within 5 years the NHS may be irreparable.

To continue down this road will mean the rise of private, US style health insurance; a system that is renowned as the poorest and the most expensive. I have already met local people who have been forced to pay privately for treatments like cataract operations and removal of painful varicose veins.

You and I can put a stop to all this nonsense: We are the 6th richest country in the world and we still have a NHS worth fighting for. The solution is to reverse the legislation, only the Labour Party can do this and I marched 300 miles to tell you that.

Please follow my campaign on social media; all my links can be found at www.fionadentlabour.com

Absent Adam

I note the Royal Borough Observers’ reporting on the very poor attendance record of Tory and UKIP RBWM councillors Simon Meadowcraft (Clewer South), Derek Sharp (Furze Platt) and Tom Bursnall (Clewer East) over the past year. To be elected to public office is a huge responsibility and candidates should think carefully before stepping forward. However, once a person is elected they really should be honour bound to turn up and make a positive contribution.

There is always the danger in local politics that a very few select people have the control of important things like the budget and planning permissions. It is exactly the back benchers like these 3, who should be at those meetings bringing the concerns of their residents to bear on decision making.

Sadly Windsor constituency residents are being particularly poorly served because not only are their councillors not turning up but I have concerns about the MP too. Adam Afriyie is listed as only participating in 8 debates in Parliament this year. What on Earth has he been doing? I know that he has his very successful international business to run but being a MP and representing a constituency is a full time job.

Perhaps Adam Afriyie and these councillors are banking on voters not noticing their absence?

Tory pride in NHS troubles

Last week the Conservative Health Minister, Jane Ellison, told the Tory Reform Group that the Government no longer had control of the NHS budget. She was not apologising, far from it, she actually said it was ‘exciting!’ The whole point of the Tory, LibDem NHS Bill was that free market forces would drive the future of our NHS and that Government would no longer be in charge.

However, in April the NHS waiting list for treatment and operations in England topped 3 million: It is not good enough to leave those people in pain waiting for treatment just because you are ‘excited’ by a free market experiment! Personally I believe that the Government should be in control of solving this problem and that it is not good enough to pass the buck down to local areas.

If the Tory LibDem NHS Bill is not significantly altered or repealed, service and treatment standards will fall further. It is the law of the free market that once services are privatised that money and resources will be syphoned off to pay shareholders and marketing managers. Nurses and Doctors will be pressured further to accept lower wages and work longer hours with fewer employment rights. None of this is good for patients or for tax payers; ie you and me.

If elected as MP for Windsor next year, I promise to fight for a stronger NHS which values it’s staff and that will remain the best Health Service in the world, offering excellent care. free at the point of need. This is a fight that we must win in 2015.

NHS & GP CRISIS across Windsor Constituency and the UK

The average waiting time for a GP appointment is set to reach over 2 weeks by next April in more than 50% of surgeries. This is due to the Condem government raiding the GP budget to fund the massively expensive, top-down re-organisation that nobody wanted in the first place. In 2010 there were 70 GPs for every 100,000 patients, now there are only 66.5 and that figure is set to drop still further.

To add to the misery, the numbers of young doctors entering GP training has dropped dramatically since 2007. The new ‘supermarket’ model of an NHS that has been imposed on us by this government has created a more stressful environment for our GPs who have to cope with longer and longer waiting lists. This year less than 70% of the GP training places across the UK, were taken up.

The government is busy removing many of the NHS targets, to try to make things easier for the doctors, but that is going to badly affect the standard of care that we, the patients, get. We can already see this in the lengthening of waiting times for operations and in the poor waiting times to start cancer treatment across England.

The NHS should not be turned into a ‘Cash Cow’ for company shareholders; the NHS is at it’s best when all it’s funding is for use on patients, staff and equipment. May 2015 is the opportunity for people to vote Labour, to end this madness and to repair our NHS.

Sloppy management of Public Services

The job of any government or local authority is to provide essential public services to an acceptable standard. However this principle seems to be lost on the current Tory leadership of Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. The RBWM internal investigation and review into the death of baby Callum told of short staffing, high turnover of staff, inexperienced, overworked social workers with unmanageable caseloads. Since then bland assurances about children’s services have been made by the leadership but no detail given as to how the sloppy management of the last 5 years will not be repeated.

The very same staffing problems are taking place in adult services too; ie where the care of vulnerable older people and those with disabilities is managed. Worst of all RBWM is doing nothing to manage the situation, agency staff come and go, morale is low and staff are worn out. Morale is so bad in this department that RBWM has been unable to recruit enough permanent staff.

The Boroughs staffing problems started 5 years ago when Mr Burbage decided that he wanted to cut harder and faster than any other local authority in the country. His annual cuts to council tax have been paid for with staff cuts in Social Services, Sure Start and numerous other essential services.

The extent of the poor management became clear this week when Councillor Simon Dudley announced that there was an underspend of £1.2 million on the budget; ie they cannot even control their budget to provide the services that we, the tax payers, have been promised.

RBWM Tory leadership has been in charge too long, we need Labour Councillors in the meetings challenging, scrutinising and changing unsound decisions. Next May, please vote Labour to bring balance and fair play back into local politics.

Youth Unemployment

My son left school 7 years ago and he was lucky in that he found a job quickly and has managed to build a career. However I still see a number of his old school friends, in Windsor and Maidenhead, unemployed and strugging on benefits to get a start in life. According to the right-of-centre think tank ‘Policy Exchange,’ 70,000 job seekers have had their benefits unfairly withdrawn; they say that this is one of the reasons for the rise of the use of food banks (like Foodshare in Maidenhead). The double whammy of damaged prospects, from lack of work experience, and financial punishment is not helping our younger generation.

Nationwide, the numbers of unemployed 16 to 24 year olds is nearly a million and it is estimated that if they all stood in the dole queue at the same time that the line would stretch from London to Edinburgh! It is time for the government to work with employers to provide a guaranteed, compulsory starter job and training for all young people who have been out of work or education for a year. The Labour party have produced a fully costed plan to do this; for the sake of the Royal Borough youth, lets hope they can shame the Condems into implementing their plan.

Printed in local newspapers March 2014

Ban the burner!

A couple of weeks ago the UK received a visit from a poison cloud, full of invisible toxins and very visible saharan sand. Poison clouds move with the air currents and there is no such thing as a ‘safe area’ in our world. However we cannot always blame other countries for our problems.

Unfortunately, one of the most unpleasant polluters of air locally is one that could have been prevented by the 2007 Conservative led, Slough Borough Council, it drops it’s poison on Slough, Maidenhead and Windsor residents daily. Last summer temperatures soared and most of us enjoyed spending time out-doors; then on the morning on the 5th September, the Colnbrook incinerator released an enormous cloud of toxic particles into our atmosphere. A local air quality monitoring station recorded a massive 985 rating of course, particulate matter; the rating level that is considered safe is below 54! 

The waste that is burned there daily, includes radioactive waste. Another type of incinerator pollution are dioxins, they are invisible, not measured, and are some of the most dangerous airborne poisons. All the air pollutants are densest in the 17 mile radius round the incinerator and locally that also includes reservoirs that we drink from.

Infant deaths, ischaemic heart disease, bronchial/lung and many cancers are caused by polluted air and found in high percentages in areas close to incinerators. Locally, we inhale the toxic waste sent to be burned by Ealing, Brent, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow and Richmond on Thames councils. 

Surely we know enough about poisons, disease, carbon fuels and climate change by now to know that we must stop burning? Ban the burners and lets get real about our health and the air we breathe. 

NHS privatisation in Berkshire

The future for Berkshire NHS services has never been at greater risk. 

In March 2014Adam Afriye MP and Theresa May MP both voted with the Government to allow the Health Secretary to close hospitals even when they are performing well (section 119 of the Care Bill). A closure order can now be made in order to move funds from good hospitals to others that are struggling financially. 

Between the 3rd and the 11th of April there was a very brief public consultation by the Competition and Markets Authority on the merger of Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust with Heatherwood and Wexham Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Only a week was given for us to say how the merger could affect the quality of care for NHS patients locally.

The door is now open for the ever increasing speed of privatisation of the NHS and the prioritisation of profit over quality of service. The NHS is the bedrock of our caring society and it is distressing to know that the futures of Heatherwood, Wexham Park and Saint Marks Hospitals could be decided with such little reference to the local community.

Our chances of living healthy lives are directly related to how well off we are and how far we live from health services. Less well-off people cannot afford long, expensive journeys or to take time off work to visit distant health services. There is no greater inequality than the difference between good health and poor health and shorter life spans. I urge people to speak up and defend Heatherwood hospital and other local NHS services at every opportunity. Let’s not lose our precious NHS to ‘death by a thousand cuts’.

Click through to Save Heatherwood Hospital Campaign.

DITCHING DATCHET!

In January I lost my car in the floods and the insurance payment hardly covered half of the cost of the replacement. In February, my partner’s house was flooded throughout the ground floor, the floorboards are still raised, it stinks and the dehumidifiers continue to thrum. Since then I have been disgusted by the lack of support from both David Cameron and local councils.

Cameron has refused to claim from the EU Solidarity Fund to improve UK flood defences, he prefers that the UK taxpayer picks up the tab even though the European money (at least £140 million) is ours for the taking. He is also responsible for the massive cuts to the Environment Agency flood prevention work (by a third) and he shows no sign of correcting his mistake, despite warnings of more extreme weather to come in the future.

The Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead leadership have recently refused to contribute to the strengthening of flood defences along the Thames. The riverside residents near Maidenhead town were protected from flooding by the Jubilee channel but downstream, Datchet residents were badly flooded when the Jubilee released the water it could not cope with. The Jubilee was only ever intended to be one of a series of similar flood defences on the Thames and it is sickening that a council should now try to wriggle out of it’s responsibilities, leaving Datchet, Old Windsor, Runnymede and Staines to sink.

Local MPs, Mrs May and Mr Afriye have had little constructive to say on this matter; will they lobby David Cameron and the RBWM, to correct their failures and help their constituents? Unlikely, Mr Afriye is against the benefits of EU membership and Mrs May always tows the party line.

Mrs May and FGM

Finally the Crown prosecution Service has announced that it is bringing a prosecution against 2 men for Female Genital Mutilation. This is an issue that I have worked with and campaigned on for years at www.actiononfgm.com and am relieved that we have now taken this small step to stop this appalling abuse of defenceless children.

However it would be wrong to think that this prosecution is a game changer: Last July I met with Mrs May MP to discuss her role as Home Secretary in ensuring that FGM is prevented in the UK. Her response was to reiterate the advice that can be found in the UK strategy to reduce violence against women and girls. Unfortunately this approach is based on the concept of ‘abandonment;’ ie the main thrust of Government policy is simply to ask people to abandon the abuse!

While there is a important role for community development, counselling and giving health advice, we must not forget that the UN deems FGM as ‘torture,’ it is a an extremely violent crime with a lifelong health and happiness impact and is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. I would say that simply asking people to stop it is not good enough.

There is a need for a proactive response from the Government, particularly the Home Office, to provide funds to bring Police, CPS, Health, Social Services, Education and Charities together to collect the data and evidence. Also to ensure that girls who show signs of being victims or being at risk can be physically examined. Far better to have a sensitive examination by a caring nurse than being attacked with a knife and permanently damaged.

Please go to my website at www.actiononfgm.com and follow the link to my Parliamentary e-petition to demand that MPs debate this proposal. Thank you

Has Adam Afriye done a deal with Nigel Farage?

The Telegraph has reported that Nigel Farage is considering NOT putting up Parliamentary Candidates in constituencies like Windsor, because of the anti-European stance of certain Tory candidates!

Has a back room deal been done? We know that Mr Afriye is not a team player, as shown by the way he handled his fantasy leadership challenge in the Autumn. However, his lack of popularity in the Tory Party may well have pushed him into the arms of UKIP. 

A self made man, Mr Afriye may be, but he still needs people to vote for him in the General Election if he wants to remain an MP. His appallingly handled leadership challenge has upset many people who voted for him last time. There is also a growing disquiet that he hardly ever shows up to community events in Windsor and only then when he is campaigning; similarly he is a stranger in the House of Commons: His apparent failure to consult with or represent his constituency has become so noticeable that many people refer to him as 'Absent Adam.'

Perhaps he will be hoping that UKIP supporters will vote for him in 2015 or will the much ignored Windsor residents stand up for their rights and vote for a change?

 Telegraph Link.

37p or 30 pieces of silver? (The cutting of services in RBWM)

The rush of a hard line Council leadership, in leafy Berkshire, to reduce staff pay, delete jobs or place them in the increasingly unregulated private sector, is reaching fever pitch.

Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead staff have been told that there will be no wage increases for all but some of the lowest paid. Many people, who are already earning much less than the National average, wil get absolutely nothing. The reality of this is that in real terms, wages will drop and the living standards of the people who work and provide essential services for us, local residents, will also continue to drop.

All this, so the average Council Tax (band D) payment can go down by 37p per week. None of us like paying tax but I doubt if these ‘real terms’ pay cuts are the best way to provide essential services like home care for the elderly. Many of us would prefer to pay the 37p and have good services, provided by quality staff.

2 weeks ago RBWM staff found out about 31 more council job deletions by chancing upon a lengthy press release on the council’s website! Clearly the Council Leadership’s strong points are not communications, good manners nor team building. The staff should have been the first to know. Far from improving public services, these cuts will place an additional burden on existing hard working staff, who are already trying to absorb extra workloads resulting from previous cuts. There comes a point when cuts actually mean reduced or inferior services. Is that what local residents really want? No, we don’t!

Lastly, local businesses will also continue to suffer as the 1500 RBWM employees tighten their belts even further. Lower wages for such a large group of local residents will  mean that there is less money to spend in local shops and businesses, destroying the local economy still further.

George Osbourn is resigning as Chancellor! Great News!

Great news, yesterday George Osbourn said that he planned to increase the minimum wage to £7: Only the Low Pay Commission has the power to do this so George must be planning to resign from the Chancellorship and apply to work for the Low Pay Commission!

(However, I am not sure that he has the qualifications for the LPC job as he has never shown an interest in the cost of living before!)

Secondly, the one big thing he promised to do 4 years ago was to reduce the national debt which was just under £70 billion at the time. Now it is over £200 billion because George struggled to get the economy going by not having any plan except 'cuts'. Cuts, of course, did little but strangle the economy and throw people out of work. Now that the rest of the world is climbing out of recession, it is thankfully dragging the UK along with it.

On the 15th of January 2014, George voted AGAINST the Labour motion to raise the minimum wage. Then just 24 hours later he changed his mind and announced this empty promise. What is he up to? Well empty headline grabbing of course! Oh dear, the Tories are on the run.

LABOUR wants to see a LIVING WAGE not just a minimum one and will tackle the crisis of the massive gap between rich and poor.