Jeremy Deller may be Britain’s official political artist at the Venice Biennale, but Mark McGowan the Artist taxi driver is telling it like it is as usual. This time about the Tory Academisation programme. Another example of the merging of corporate and government interests.
An example of the increasingly intimate merger of government and corporate interests, former New Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn recently joined Price Waterhouse Coopers to head up a board overseeing the consultancy and accountancy giant’s private health care business, which is moving in on the NHS now that the Health and Social Care Act is in place.
Milburn is also chairman of the European Advisory Board of Bridgepoint Capital, the vulture fund investors behind Care UK, which runs the Todmorden and Halifax walk in health centres and also provides diagnostic services for Calderdale NHS.
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This Guardian video shows how to spot as die back in spring, and links to the Forestry Commission website for more info. If you see ash die back disease, the Forestry Commission would like you to report it
Interesting video from Festival of Journalism in Perugia, about Crowd-sourced citizen journalism
Greenpeace support for the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has allied it with US national interests and oil companies that stand to benefit from an underwater land grab of around 1.5 million square miles of sea bed. This is the area that UNCLOS has opened up for hydrocarbon and mineral exploration by U.S. firms alone. It includes part of the Arctic sea. At the same time, Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign aims to create a sanctuary in the uninhabited area around the North Pole and a ban on offshore oil drilling and industrial fishing in the wider Arctic region.
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Calderdale Save Our Services has purchased 1,000 of the Keep Our NHS Public cards that people can fill in and ask their GP to attach to their medical records.
If anyone wants some, please let Pete Keal know at calderdalesosc@gmail.com
Thanks to local campaigning, the two GP centres run by Care UK (one in Todmorden and one in Halifax) will remain open until September, when Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) aims to have completed its review of how to provide primary and community unplanned health care (ie urgent care that isn’t A& E).
Care UK has been at the front of the queue for NHS privatisations. It was acquired by vulture fund company Bridgepoint in 2010, and according to Corporate Watch,
“carries huge debt, avoids tax, siphons money off to its private equity owners, and has been accused of negligence and abuse.”
This was the first Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCCG) meeting after the House of Lords approved the NHS ‘section 75’ regulations on 24th April. These hotly-opposed regulations open up the NHS to far more private sector competition. Caroline Molloy, writing on the Open Democracy website, states that
“overturning the NHS Privatisation Regulations was always going to be tough. Nonetheless, the spectacle of Lords with private healthcare interests, voting them through, raises fundamental questions about our democracy.”
Now that these new NHS privatisation regulations are law, how can local campaigners work effectively to keep our NHS public? Calderdale 38 Degrees NHS Group is looking for ways to work with Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to protect Calderdale NHS from privatisation. This report is based on notes from Calderdale 38 Degrees NHS Group.
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2020 Vision Hebden Bridge in 2020: A better place for all, is pretty much business as usual. This Draft Action Plan is up for consultation and there is a launch & public consultation day today, 18th May, 10am-3pm at Hebden Bridge Town Hall.
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