Who will do something about the following?

• Nurses
  • One in four NHS wards routinely operate with staffing levels that threaten patient safety
  • Health care assistants are being used to shore up staffing numbers on NHS wards.
  • For every 25 patients, substituting one qualified nurse for a lower qualified member of staff was associated with a 21% increase in the risk of dying prematurely.

• Cancer Survival Rates: % patients surviving 5 years:
  • Colon:                   UK 60%; Australia 71%
  • Lung:                     UK 14.7%; Canada 21.7%
  • Rectal:                  UK 62%; Australia 71%
  • Pancreatic:          UK 7.9%; Australia 14.6%
  • Stomach:             UK 18%; Australia 30%; Canada 27%; Ireland 25%;
  • Ovarian:               UK 38%; Sweden 42%

• Cancer Waiting Times:
  • Patients with an urgent referral letter by their GP are meant to start treatment within 62 days.
  • July 2019: 78% did that – target is 85%. Target last hit in December 2015. In last 12 months 28k waited longer than 2 months and 11k waited over 3 months

• Waiting list for routine operations:
  • Currently 4.1m; the highest since 2007

Who will do something about the following?

• Literacy: ‘An adult whose facility with language is that which would be expected from an 11-year-old’
  • . 5 million UK adults (16%) do not reach this standard. Finland, Norway, South Korea achieve 100%
  • A child’s score in a literacy test at the age of 7 has been shown to be a very close predictor of lifetime earnings. One in five children cannot read as well as they should by the end of primary school.

• You make more difference to the life of a child in its earliest years, than at any other time. For every £1 spent at this point in a child’s life, with childcare with qualified staff, £7 of later unnecessary expenditure is saved.
• 1% of children live in a care home – but they account for 40% of those who end up in young offender institutions. Children who used to live in care make up 25% of the prison population. (Annual cost per annum £35k per person). Germany, Norway and Denmark have alternative and much more successful models helping children who lived in care avoid offending.

During the General election there were two incidents where the performance of our prison and probation services were highlighted.

In one, the terrorist attacker on London Bridge , Usman Khan, had been released from jail on licence. In the second, Joseph McGann, described as Britain’s most dangerous rapist, was released from jail by mistake.

Whilst no-ne can condone any mistakes made by the prison and probation services; the following also needs to be noted:

• Real resources for our Probation Services are down £1 billion since 2010
• The number of probation staff has halved between 2011 and 2018. In 2011 there were 18,655 probation staff; in 2018 there were 9,574
• During this period, Chris Grayling, when Justice Secretary in 2014, introduced a part privatisation of the Probation Service which has subsequently been damningly criticised by Inspectors and Parliamentary Committees

The referendum was ill conceived and a failure of political leadership. No problem with having a referendum but at least do it properly. Have an initial referendum on the principle of leaving with a requirement to get a minimum of 60% of the voters supporting a ‘leave’ position. Then hold a second referendum on the terms achieved, requiring only a 50% majority.

Boris Johnson then gets a deal, the House of Commons votes for it and the leadership of all the other parties fall into the trap of agreeing to a general election in which the Conservative Party only need to win between 30% and 40% of the votes  to win a seat, especially if they cooperate with UKIP which they do, whilst the opposition parties fight between themselves!

So, Boris, untrusted by the people, seen by so many as a charlatan and a liar, triumphs because our opposition politicians didn’t wait and let the deal go through its parliamentary process and then vote for a referendum!

After that we could have had a general election, focusing on all those critical issues affecting our country.

Who will do something about the following?

• On current trends the average British family will have 15% less cash coming in by 2020 than it had in 2008.
• UK has higher level of inequality than many other developed countries: Spain, Italy, Canada, Germany, France, Denmark
• 50% of children are born into renting families
• 1/3 of millennials face renting their entire lives
• Share of household income going to the richest 1% has tripled in the past three decades
• We have a 10-year gap in male life expectancy between richest and poorest areas
• Wealthiest people are more likely be living as a couple. Among the poor declining numbers are living with a partner, a pattern attributed to increasing job insecurity, a lack of financial independence and more ‘chaotic lives’

Who will address the issues highlighted in Jonathan Pie’s You Tube report in March 2019?

‘Over 10 painful years our obdurate, stubborn and arrogant politicians have obsessed about keeping their irrelevant political parties together whilst walking the country into a food blender.

There were two types of Brexit voter:

1. Over 50, southern, gammon faced, Daily Mail reader, who wants to turn the UK into a neoliberal unregulated free market paradise. But your average leave voter explains nothing
2. It’s the marginal leave voter that explains everything.  In the 2015 General Election; UKIP got 26% of the vote –a protest against the three main parties. Translate that sentiment to the referendum and boom:
   1. People whose prospects are down the pan
   1. People who have lost job stability
   1. People whose pensions benefits have been cut
   1. People who have had to move house due to the bedroom tax
   1. People who suddenly see no prospect of their kids going to university
   1. People whose disability benefits are denied by a corporate box ticking t…

We are in this mess because the politicians broke the contract between a citizen and his / her government. A government’s basic job is to extort money from the working people – in the form of taxes – ‘I’ll have some of that’. I’m fine with that so long as the government redistributes that money wisely and fairly.

Austerity broke the contract.

• When you make a conscious choice not to invest in education and at the same time massively rack up the private cost of further education, you break the contract
• When you outsource the distribution of benefits to private companies whose main motivation is profit, you break the contract
• When the private sector decides who deserves help and who doesn’t, the government is essentially saying it can’t do its job; it’s given up on delivering
• The entire UK economy has become a market for laundering Russian dirty money which inflates house prices, so most people can barely afford rent, let alone a deposit for a house.

This would never happen in a country with reasonably functioning institutions, with the wellbeing of its citizens at its heart.

These are all massive public policy failures which have led to a breakdown of trust between the electorate and the government; then you sprinkle in ‘its immigrants’ fault’ and ‘we pay the EU too much’ and it resonates with the have-nots and the struggling. That’s how populism works. It masks political failure / accountability by blaming others.

We have a first past the post electoral system that doesn’t work – that disenfranchises massive swathes of the electorate. 4m people voted for UKIP in the 2015 election and they only got one MP. That’s not healthy.

And then we’re amazed that when there’s a vote about something that really matters people vote for

• F… you
• I’m better off without your bullshit
• I have to get my groceries from a food bank

They wanted to send a message; they did not want the status quo – they wanted to send a message and that’s how we got Brexit

Brexit won’t solve any of our underlying problems. It has exposed them: Our Constitution; Our Institutions; Our Democratic System; Our Politicians. They are not fit for purpose.

If they don’t deliver Brexit they are failing in their jobs. If they do deliver Brexit, they are knowingly damaging this country

So, we have chosen irrelevance

• We’re giving up our seat at the table
• We’re a laughingstock abroad
• We’re self-obsessed with our own self-importance whilst being fed for breakfast to much larger trading blocs like China, India, the USA – dividing up between themselves the Brexit dividend’

Who will speak up and celebrate Europe and the world’s progress since 1976?

• Soviet Union declares peace with the West
• End of Cold War with no shot fired
• China not a military threat
• No nuclear weapon used against an enemy
• No wars between major nations at all
• Western Europe at peace continually; no inter-state since end of WWI
• East Germany opens its border
• Students sledgehammer the Berlin Wall
• Iron Curtain vanishes
• Nations of central and Eastern Europe become liberal democracies with hardly a drop of blood being spilled
• Fascism vanishes from Europe – Portugal, Spain and Greece
• Liberal democracies in Taiwan, South Korea and most of South and Central America
• President of Egypt hugs the Prime Minister of Israel in the Knesset
• Jordan makes lasting peace with Israel
• Apartheid dismantled in South Africa
• Nelson Mandela becomes President
• No inter-state war between major developed countries since 1945
• No developed country has expanded their territory since the late 1949s by conquering another country
• No recognised state has gone out of existence through conquest

Annual deaths in battle over the past 60 years have fallen by more than 90%, around half a million a year in the late 1940s to around 30,000 in the early 2000s despite Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, etc

Proud of Being British

For most of my life I have been proud of being British. Why?

• We are a union of four countries, celebrating our differing traditions and histories, working together in partnership for the common good 
• We are a generous, hospitable, tolerant and welcoming people, respectful of different cultures and ways of life
• Our democratic political system has been characterised, on the whole, by integrity and truthfulness
• We have stood up for liberty and fought against fascism, genocide and tyranny
• We are a nation that commands affection and respect throughout the world
• We have a judicial system that is independent and impartial
• We have a free press and the BBC
• Freedom of speech is a bedrock of our nation
• We have had political leaders of intelligence and wisdom
• We care for our environment
• Our economic system has simultaneously encouraged wealth creation, provided free universal health care and education whilst protecting the weak and disadvantaged
• We try to create opportunities for all
• There was a consensus that the better off had an obligation to support those less fortunate
• We helped break down barriers between countries, building alliances to prevent war and killing
• We pioneered inclusion, diversity and tolerance in human relationships
• We value truth, integrity and an ill-defined but nonetheless important sense of fairness and fair play
• We recognise we are not perfect and have made mistakes

Now I now feel less proud; all has not changed but I wish I could say the following as well:

• We only go to war with broad international consensus or support
• If an unreasonable veto (es) are used at the Security Council, we will build a majority in the General Assembly before supporting armed interventions
• We condemn unequivocally the torture of prisoners
• When we have referenda, we will only do so when we are clear about the question and agree a % that needs to be achieved for the result to be binding
• We welcome refugees to our country from persecution and oppression
• We passionately defend everyone’s freedom of speech – with the only caveat being that it does not break the law
• We believe that the ratio between the pay of a CEO compared to the mean full-time working income of employees in an organisation should be nearer the ration of 30 times, which it was in the 1990s, compared to the 185 times that it is now
• People in their twenties and thirties can afford to buy a home
• We celebrate the success of the vast majority of European countries maintaining the longest period of peace in Europe, without war, for nearly a millennia.
• Our MPs behave in a way of which we can be proud – both with regard to their remuneration and their actions and language
• Everyone in work receives a decent and reasonable income
• Our society cares for and supports those who are disadvantaged and in difficulty
• We treat all prisoners humanely regardless of the heinousness of their crimes