The government’s plans will open the door to a private healthcare system like the one used in the USA. 49% of hospital beds will be handed over to the private sector and campaigners anticipate the introduction of charges and the deterioration of services over time.
There has been massive opposition to the plans from health workers, patients and trade unions. 70,000 people watched the trade union rally opposing the Bill last week, and thousands more have signed petitions to save the NHS.
Local activist Ben Rubery said: ‘Working class people will not sit back and watch as our NHS is carved up and handed over to private companies by the government. We will struggle to save free, public healthcare for ourselves and future generations.’
The protest will take place outside the constituency office of John Hemming MP (1772 Coventry Road, B26 1PB) at 10:45am on Saturday 24th March. It is being organised by Socialist Alternative
Birmingham Against The Cuts 
Can I ask that you please avoid intimidating the people who are visiting my office to have their real problems dealt with. You have a right to protest, but not a right to ensure that people are frightened from asking for help.
I understand the feelings and probably share them, but why John Hemming’s office? Because he is LibDem? Because, regardless of being LibDem, he voted in favour of the passing the Bill? Or some other reason?
I just don’t know why his office is the one being selected and ask to know why, as against various other MPs’ offices in Birmingham.
Please accept, this is not a loaded question. I really am interested in knowing why this specific office.
Hello,
Firstly please not that as stated the protest is organised by Socialist Alliance, not by us, we are simply publicising the event as we believe it will be of interest to people who read the blog.
I would say that John Hemming’s office has been chosen because he is a local Lib Dem MP who voted for the health bill. It would make no sense at all to protest outside one of the Labour MPs who (I assume) all voted against it, and as far as I know that leaves the Conservative MP in Sutton Coldfield, John Hemming and Lorely Burt in Solihull.
My guess would be that John Hemming is the MP for the people who have organised this protest.
It is an entirely valid argument to protest outside my office. I did vote for the Bill. I think that it is good for the patients. However, I am asking that the protestors don’t intimidate people coming to see me with their problems.
To be fair in Birmingham it is only worth protesting outside Andrew Mitchell o r my office because the other Birmingham MPs probably didn’t vote for the bill.
Hi John,
I have emailed the person who sent me the press release to draw their attention to your request/comment. I do not think this will be a problem and wouldn’t promote an event at which I thought protesters would seek to intimidate members of the public.
Tom (Internet person for batc)
Thanks for that. It is important to allow people to talk to me about their problems. It can be life and death at times. Normally not that important, but often people are destitiute if the benefits system has failed to work properl y.
Reblogged this on Gogwit's Blog.
Socialist Alternative only supports peaceful, democratic forms of protest. We would never under any circumstances try to intimidate members of the public, and the protest tomorrow will be no exception. The aim is to peacefully voice our opposition to the Health Bill, which we believe will ultimately lead to the full scale privatisation of the NHS and the emergence of a profit-based healthcare system like the one in the USA. As others have said, we decided to hold the protest outside John Hemming’s office as he is one of the only Birmingham MPs to have voted for the Bill. We look forward to discussing the issue further with people (both supporters and opponents!) during the protest tomorrow.
The problem, however, is that you have timed the protest to co-incide with my advice bureau. If the protest was scheduled for 12.30 then there would not be a problem. However, I expect you to frighten a few people off so that they don’t get the opportunity to have their problem solved.
That’s the same as saying protest should only take place where it doesn’t draw attention to the people in power, you in this case, who are being protested against. I believe George W Bush was a strong believer in freedom of speech, provided it took place in special freedom of speech zones where no one would see or notice it.
Democracy isn’t just voting every five years, particularly given there isn’t a right of recall (as Nick Clegg championed before the election but has been strangely silent on after). You voted for a bill that doctors, nurses, the BMA, the Royal Colleges and GPs, the very people you say you want to place at the centre of the new ‘NHS’, asked you to scrap, and that the majority of the public do not support. You haven’t made the case why the people who work in the NHS are wrong and you are right.
I attended the protest. It was good natured and entirely peaceful. We leafleted a good few people going into the surgery and some of the substantial crowd going in the fishing shop (fishing, most popular hobby in the UK).
Some mystery member of the public called the police, who turned up attended. I had a dialogue with them and they were completely ok with what we were doing. We weren’t asked to move or anything else, and the police seemed a bit embarrassed to have been called out. Perhaps people should think about wasting police resources before they panic and dial 999 because they see someone holding a placard saying ‘Save the NHS’.
Right at the very end you blustered out, accused us of intimidating your constituents and that you’d only had three people come along since we’d turned up. This certainly wasn’t the case as we’d seen two pairs of people go in as well as a number of individuals. Perhaps we should have taken their details to prevent baseless accusations, but that would have been invasive and people might have found it intimidating, and we were there to inform members of the public and talk to them.
If you can produce a constituent who felt intimidated, I’ll buy them a coffee in the Costa in Acocks Green and explain why I felt I had to protest regarding the health bill, the concerns the medical community and the public have regarding it and why it affects them as well.
You simply repeated the accusation that we were intimidating constituents, which I think would have carried more weight if you hadn’t made it before the protest took place, weren’t particularly interested in a dialogue and went off to a meeting straight away. It was a microcosm of the failures of our democracy, where politicians hear what they want to hear and ignore dissent that falls outside what the powerful wish to allow. Andrew Lansley’s approach to ‘listening’ is much the same.
I voted for you in 2010, and I’ve come to regret it. I did so because I was taken in by some of the things the Lib Dems said, and the idea that there was a party that sort of understood that there was something wrong with the country, and had some solutions that went a bit of the way to fixing it. I know now how false that belief was, as do so many others, particularly young people.
I encouraged other people to vote Lib Dem. I’d even considered coming and helping the party canvas, but couldn’t make it because of work and personal commitments. I want you to understand the level of deep and personal shame I feel because I voted for you and because I encouraged my friends to do so as well.
I voted Lib Dem in 2010. In 2012 I’m standing against them in a council seat. I feel a lot of people should turn the embarrassment and anger they feel about being taken in by ‘Cleggmania’ into effective action in their local communities to fight cuts, to fight privatisation of health services, schools and even the police here in the West Midlands, because the Coalition is a government of the rich that serves in the interests of the rich. We’re a society, we aren’t a garage sale for banks and hedge funds to pick over what they want from the public assets of the UK, which is what the Coalition is doing.
We need to oppose a the unfolding horror that is the Coalition, where even in a recession the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
You’re a tiny part of that John, and it would have been easy to take cheap personal shots at you because of some of the things you’ve done, but we didn’t, because this isn’t about you and it isn’t about me either. It’s about doing the best thing for the people of this country, and opposing the Health Bill is a part of that.
There were people who were frightened. You could have protested on the other side of the road or timed the protest to start at the end of the advice bureau. Instead you caused the maximum disruption for people who had problems.
That is not right. It is not the same as protesting outside a speech or conference. It is attacking vulnerable people and preventing them from having access to their political representative.
I think you have a massive cheek to accuse people protesting about cuts and opening up the NHS for private firms to move in of attacking vulnerable people.
If you had nothing to do in your bureau, why did you want until it was over to come out and start grandstanding?
One point of clarification is that I count the people at the advice bureau in terms of the main complainants rather than the number of people in each group. Hence when I said there were 15 people attending there were probably another 15 people with them.
Hence the three attendances after you started disrupting things was probably 5-6 people in total, but only three coming about a problem.
Your staff opened the door to let people in on more than three occasions John. I really would not pursue that line because if you make an issue of it, and it gets picked up by the media, what if more than three people come forward to say they walked past us, got a leaflet, and went in to see you.
Who were all those extra people you were letting in who weren’t there to see you about problems?
And can you produce anyone who was frightened? I’ll go and apologise to them in person.
It sounds very much like you don’t like a protest that identified you with a policy you support and that the public and medical professions don’t.
Could you address the question of why Doctors, nurses, GPs, the Royal Colleges and the BMA are wrong to call for the health bill to be scrapped and you are right to support it?
This isn’t about you as an individual John, it’s about a policy that is already damaging the NHS and will do further damage to the NHS.
I had already made the request that you avoided frightening people off. (see above) Clearly you were not going to take any notice of that request.
When people protest they should think about the people affected. It might be that four attendances occurred after the demo turned up, but whichever way the advice bureau switched from being busy to quiet.
I came out when the bureau finished. Your demonstration had an immediate effect on real people. Those people had come to the advice bureau because they had problems that they thought (rightly in most cases) that I could assist with. You acted to prevent people having their problems solved.
There were many ways you could have organised the demonstration to avoid affecting the vulnerable, but you didn’t care.
For every frightened person you can produce I’ll donate £1 to the Lib Dems.
I think you should be very careful about putting words in other people’s mouths John.
If I didn’t care about vulnerable people I would be supporting you and the Coalition. I’m a reasonably young, healthy, white male in employment and while I’m working class I sound pretty middle class, the Coalition doesn’t have me on the hit list.
If my local Lib Dem/Tory council shut respite centres for disabled children, does that personally affect me? No.
But I talk to people, I know people who’ve faced delays in getting their operations because of the Fast, Slow, Stop policy, people who have been putting into pensions their whole working lives and have got them under attack from the Coalition.
I’ve talked to nurses, who are facing pay cuts and a pension downgrade, and who are getting stretched thinner and thinner as the number of nurses drops and who can’t spend the time with patients that they need to.
The NHS is a lifeline for so many people in our society, and it needs to be defended.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to sit at home and not get involved, or to protest somewhere out of sight and out of mind, or to make excuses, but that would be lazy and cynical and be abrogating the responsibility that comes with being a citizen.
Mr Hemming, in your blog, you note that “There were people I know that were frightened”. I appreciate for obvious reasons of privacy and professional standards that under no circumstances should you ever try to validate that claim online. However, at the minute, it is your word against the protestors; surely you must recognise that very little epistemic charity is given to Liberal Democrat MPs at present.
There is another worry here, which is that you are drawing an explicit connection between the expression of dissent and causing fear. Given the state’s current level of authoritative powers to combat terrorism, I should be extremely careful in your position of no small amount of political influence with the kinds of accusation you are making of people with an explicit aim to peacefully protest.
I think it would be pretty interesting to discuss your attitude to protest and dissent. You seem to be saying that protest and freedom of speech is ok as long as it is within the parameters set by the powerful, in this case you.
I didn’t know about the posts on here until I got home, but I think you’ve raised a very important point about how politicians in our country view dissent, protest and democracy.
Suggesting that people protest an empty building (or possibly one containing your staff but not you) or protesting on the other side of the street (and it is a dual carriageway, so that would have been pretty pointless) rather than protest outside your office with you in seems to undermine the democratic role of protest in society.
I regard that role as to show the powerful (in this case you, but in a housing protest it could be a slum landlord, in a protest about poor policing it might be Digbeth police station, etc) that people oppose them and to challenge the relations in terms of power between the rulers (in this case you) and the people (in this case everyone who uses the NHS).
By saying that protest should be done in such away you misunderstand the point of protest in society. It isn’t about expressing dissent in a way that the powerful find comfortable and can ignore, but to challenge the powerful and to be effective in doing so.
I think it’s a fascinating attitude to have when the Lib Dems have attended protests in the past, with the most obvious example being the Stop the War protests.
These are general points not completely related to today, but it would be interesting to hear your views on what protest is and isn’t acceptable in a democracy, and why you feel the way you do. It’s an attitude I’ve only ever encountered in politicians and apparatchiks and I’d be fascinated to know exactly where it comes from.
What I am saying is that people should think what the effect of their actions is on the vulnerable.
Two of my friends picked me up to take me somewhere else. One was frightened by the demonstration and the other was the subject of verbal abuse. The advice bureau went quiet rather than busy when the demonstration turned up.
You may thinking picketing an accident and emergency department or citizens advice bureau is good. I am concerned as to the effect on the people who are visiting for health care and/or advice. My advice bureau is similar to any other advice bureau in that aspect.
Again this is a straw man argument and you fail to engage with the points I’ve made.
Kindly engage with them.
Why are doctors, nurses, the Royal Colleges, the BMA, and GPs, who are meant to be running the NHS under the Heath bill and who all asked for it to be scrapped, wrong?
What do you see as the role of protest in a democracy?
Mr Hemming, I appreciate that you are expressing that particular position. To paraphrase, you are worried that people who want to come and talk to you about issues that they want you to represent for them (and hence maybe aren’t the sort of people to engage in activism themselves) might be deterred from doing so, and hence from putting what may be an important point across, simply because they want to avoid getting involved in a public spectacle. You believe that protestors should avoid creating any kind of obstacle to such people, and hence should stay clear of public accessways.
But your position carries difficult consequences for the notion of protest. The way you’re framing the problem makes it such that any kind of publically visible demonstration not only could but [i]should[/i] be viewed as an act of aggression towards “the vulnerable”. This means that the only way to express discontent with an organisation or politician are the predefined channels set up by that organisation or national agencies, such as harshly worded complaint letters, reporting people to watchdog organisations or through boycott.
What do you do when none of these work? Well, at least with the NHS, we have regulatory bodies like NICE and the Care Quality Commission, and we can talk to MPs like yourselves when A&E departments or GP Surgery problems appear. Decentralization threatens even these channels!
Peaceful public protest is a way for people to bring their grievances to the attention of other people. Your parallel with Citizens Advice and A&E might work if not for the unfortunate fact that nobody watches the watchmen, and there is nowhere to go when it’s the political party that is supposed to be representing you that is the subject of your grievence.
Where you are wrong is that, for example, if the protest had started even at midday when I was there it would have achieved all the potential positives without the negatives.
I was not asking for there to be no protest, merely that it did not disrupt my advice bureau.
My sanction for it disrupting the advice bureau is to point out the damage that the protesters have done to the vulnerable people they claim to protect and hence the hypocrisy of their behaviour.
The fact that they are short of rational arguments for their political position is in fact less important.
I have tweeted to Pierre Menard to ask for his cheque. I am not going to hold my breath whilst I wait for it, however.
If you had arranged the protest for even 11.50am when I was there, but essentially the advice was over then you would have been able to argue it was aimed at me rather than the people who go to the advice bureau.
However, you arranged it directly in conflict with the advice bureau. I have acted to defend the right to protest. I have even acted to defend the right to protest against me, but I will act to protect my constituents.
On the issue of the NHS Act you have not identified a specific proposal in the bill that you are campaigning against. There is merely an inchoate criticism of the bill. Your record in attacking the vulnerable gives no credibility to your position. If you can find a specific criticism of what is in the bill (Act) rather some vague ad hominem assault on it then I will respond to that.
Why are doctors, nurses, the Royal Colleges, the BMA, and GPs, who are meant to be running the NHS under the Heath bill and who all asked for it to be scrapped, wrong?
You know what they said, you know why they said it, it isn’t down to me to repeat the position of the BMA, the Royal Colleges and GPs, when they have already made representations to the Condems asking them to scrap the bill.
You know what they have said. Why are they wrong?
>Why are doctors, nurses, the Royal Colleges, the BMA, and GPs, who are
>meant to be running the NHS under the Heath bill and who all asked for it
>to be scrapped, wrong?
That is not a specific criticism. I have asked you why you personally think it is wrong. Please tell me which sections are wrong and why they are wrong.
The sections are available on the parliament website.
It happens to be that some of the criticism is because it makes the system too accountable and makes closing a hospital too difficult. However, I am not interested in other people’s criticisms. You decided to frighten my constituents because you personally oppose the bill. What specifically is wrong about the bill?
Unlike some John, I rely on medical advice regarding medical matters. I listen to the people like GPs, who are meant to be spending £80 billion of public money and could personally benefit from this, who say they want to scrap it.
I’m not a medical expert John, and neither are you.
The BMA, the Royal Colleges , doctors, nurses and GPs are all saying scrap it. When it comes to running a national health service I listen to the people who work in it, people who are struggling with the cuts they’ve already had inflicted and say patient care will suffer. I listen to peoples stories about their waits to see their GPs getting longer. I hear a lot of people saying that their experiences are getting worse and I look at what the people who run the health service say, and it is scrap it. I see suffering John and my natural reaction is to do something about it, not a sticking plaster or fixing it for just one person, but dealing with the root cause.
You don’t know how the NHS works on the ground John, and neither do I, because we aren’t nurses, we aren’t doctors and we aren’t GPs. Those are the groups that have been frozen out and ignored by the government.
I don’t want you to debate me John, because the Health Bill is a gigantic document that we could spend all night cherry picking examples from as to why it’s terrible or why it’s not so terrible.
What I want you to do is engage with doctors, nurses, the BMA, Royal Colleges and GPs as to what the future of the health service should be free of the private sector knows best dogma that infects this government.
Debate them John, and give them the lead on how the NHS should be run, because they already do it, know how it works, and day to day struggle to get the best results for their patients.
Engage with them on it John, because we’re two random guys who deep down don’t know enough to run socialised healthcare for the UK. And the Condems are listening to a lot of people who have a vested interest in there being as little socialised healthcare in the UK as possible.
The difference is that I have the humility to say listen to the experts, and you have the hubris not to.
The problem is you have the power here John, and you’re one of a tiny number of people pushing this through.
I said it before John, this isn’t about me, I’m not setting myself up on a pedastal as a medical expert, and this isn’t about you. It’s about doing the right thing for everyone.
Scrap the bill John, engage with the people in the NHS on how it should be run.
You can turn up to work on Monday, ring someone at the BMA, and be talking to them in the afternoon John.
It’s easy.
It’s the right thing to do for the people of this country.
It’s picking up a phone, and sitting in a room listening to people.
It’s the easiest demand from a protest you will ever see.
You should do it John.
Reasons off the top of my head to be against the NHS bill:
– The NHS is opened up so that 49% of what it does can now be private medical care.
– The bill specifically takes away the requirement for there to be a National Health Service as long as there are private health care companies which people can use.
– Internal NHS reports have stated there is a high risk of damaging patient care even after mitigating effects have been put into place to stop them.
– Andrew Lansley is fighting a legal battle to stop the national risk register, a civil service produced report regarding the NHS, from being published. Anonymous reports have claimed that the contents undermine many of the claims being put forward by the government. This from the parties who are advocating transparency.
– A recently released peer reviewed paper (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2811%2961782-0/fulltext) supports the view that the NHS is getting more productive and economics year on year rather than less – rebutting the government’s main argument for the reforms.
– Introduces a postcode lottery, where instead of an integrated service aimed at great care for everyone your local health care can radically differ from people on the other side of a town or city.
– Incentivises private companies to only pick up easy patients which will give them a good rate of profit, leaving the NHS with the complicated and expensive patients which will burden the NHS even further.
– Vastly increases bureaucracy, replacing three levels of management with seven and changing the overall flow of authority from http://i.imgur.com/hGPi3.jpg to http://i.imgur.com/DgiYd.jpg
– It takes complex commissioning powers from specialists who are trained in this field to GPs, meaning GPs either have to get involved in commissioning personally which is a full time role they have no experience in and ensures they won’t see patients or they have to pay a private company to take over the role.
– There is no increase in choice. We are still stuck with what our local GPs give us, which unless they take on commissioning personally instead of seeing patients, will be decided at a regional level far above us. The only choice that’s been introduced is how much profit the private company chooses to gouge from the NHS budgets.
– By placing fragmenting commissioning into lots of smaller pieces, the NHS loses it’s economy of scale.
But that is just a few random things, as I got given a link to this blog, read through it and I wanted to comment on frankly ridiculous statement John Hemming is clinging to about his constituents being scared. Every piece of historic legislation worth mentioning has been campaigned and demonstrated on, from the Slavery Abolition Act in the 19th century to Women’s Sufferage to the UK’s nuclear policy to the Poll Tax.
If you can’t mention a single thing that the protesters did to appear appear threatening beyond being part of a peaceful demonstration, I don’t see what all all the fuss is about as this kind of activism is laudable. I am very much against the NHS bill, but if the situation were reversed I would say the same about demonstrators who were supporting the bill.
With a third of people not even turning up to vote for their government, people getting involved in the democratic process to this degree is something to be applauded. Focusing attention on people’s offended sensibilities is ridiculous. In fact I’d suggest you spend more time educating your constituents about how not to be scared of the type of peaceful democratic activism that is meant to be the backbone of any civilised state; which coincidently might have the happy side-effect of leaving you less time to support god-awful legislation.
So. In other words. You don’t have any specific criticisms of the Bill/Act. Merely that someone else doesn’t like it.
And to promote that viewpoint you are willing to frighten people away from my advice bureau.
Just pick up the phone John, listen to the experts, listen to the people who work day to day in the Health service.
You’re not an expert John, I’m not an expert, we aren’t going to get anything constructive out of us debating it. That isn’t going to change anything, or benefit anyone.
Engage with actual experts John, because they’re asking you to scrap it.
Just pick up the phone on Monday and call the BMA. Meet with them, let them explain why they want it scrapped.
I will leave it at this. You accept that you don’t know what is wrong with the bill. You believe that the BMA are “the experts” and we should replace democracy with “do what the BMA say”. Ok. That is a political position. Not one which I agree with. It is a corporatist form of “government by the experts.”
All I ask is that you don’t scare vulnerable people away from my advice bureau. Start the demo just before the end of the advice bureau rather than at the start. I will talk to the demonstrators. We have have a row about corporatism. I will support (representative) democracy. You will support corporatism and we will all go away happy.
It’s pretty rich to talk about democracy when nothing about this giant, unwanted reorganisation is in the Coalition Agreement, no mention of it was made at the general election, and Cameron in fact said that he [b]wouldn’t[/b] waste time and money on another giant top-down reform.
Nothing about this bill is democratic. Cameron has directly broken a pre-election promise. It’s been sprung on an unwilling public by a few Downing Street wonks, a bunch of slick salesmen for the private healthcare industry, the pestilential management consultancies and of course a generous dose of docile, bovine, whipped MPs.
I didn’t vote for you to do anything to the NHS John. If you had stood on a platform of implementing the health bill I wouldn’t have voted for you John, and I don’t know anyone who would have who isn’t already voting Tory.
The Tories specifically said they wouldn’t engage in a top down reform of the NHS.
This isn’t representative democracy vs corporatism John. If you ask the man on the street if they support the NHS reforms they would say no.
If you so strongly believe I’m wrong, resign and fight a by election on a point of principle like David Davis did. If you are convinced that the people of England are so solidly behind the Condem vision for the NHS then you can prove it, and I’ll put my hands up and say the public have chosen it and I’m sure we’ll end up butting heads later on privatisation of the police. It would be a gutsy move John, but if you are convinced the public are behind you then yeah, I’ll eat my words.
But I’m not asking that. I’m just asking you to pick up a phone and talk to people, people who get up each day and see patients and see how delivering healthcare works. People who know how providing healthcare to people works.
You think that the Condems have the knowledge to completely change how the NHS works without the support of the people in it. I accept I’m not an expert John. You need to accept that to.
Listening to the representatives of the ordinary people, the doctors and nurses, and the GPs you want to force to run commissioning in the NHS, who have all asked for it to be scrapped isn’t corporatism John, it’s listening to people.
All I’m asking you to do is pick up the phone on Monday John. Find out why the people you are putting in charge of the NHS in this bill want the bill to be scrapped.
It’s easy.
Actually, I think I was wrong earlier – it was in the Coalition Agreement. OK. So after promising to leave the NHS alone at the election, the Tories met with the Lib Dems met in secret while forming the government and agreed that they would do the exact opposite. I guess that’s what you mean by ‘democracy’.
Wow John, way to sling some mud, misstate Ben’s position and then run.
What a massive arsehole. Hope he sticks to making awful early day motions about the metric system rather than anything that actually matters.
You’re everything that’s wrong with the LibDems, you spineless, devious, cowardly little man.
i notice T Hyatt’s post has been ignored as inconvenient