We must ensure that nobody will ever again be afraid to ask for medical treatment
We really do have to get rid of this Tory government and replace it with a Labour government different from any other. This story (see link below) about asylum seekers being afraid to get NHS treatment is just one of many reasons. Asylum seekers are afraid of being presented with a bill they have no means of paying, and they are afraid of the Home Office. The groundwork was laid for such fears a good number of years ago by governments of all stripes. A Labour Health Secretary was one who helped. At the end of my research into the treatment of asylum seekers, which I finished in 2010,[1] I wrote this in the wake of the news that an asylum seeker had been refused cancer treatment:
On 30 March 2009 the UK Court of Appeal ruled that failed asylum seekers were not entitled to free National Health Service treatment in England, overruling an earlier High Court ruling that they were. One exception was allowed: if an asylum seeker cannot return home and cannot pay in advance hospitals must consider treatment, but they were at the mercy of the discretion of the hospital. Lord Justice Ward expressed his views on failed asylum seekers clearly: they should not be here and should never have come in the first place. Health Secretary Alan Johnson was “pleased with the Court of Appeal’s judgment that asylum seekers cannot acquire ordinary resident status which would entitle them to treatment and a range of other services.”
When Jeremy Corbyn protests about a Tory statement or policy, the reply often comes back “Labour did the same thing.” Those of us in the Labour Party should always acknowledge the fact when it’s true and we will all have to make sure things are different next time by constantly holding Labour ministers to account. Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott has said clearly, when speaking of the Windrush scandal, “This will not happen when I am Home Secretary.” She will face strong opposition from Home Office officials who are currently enjoying the implementation of the “hostile environment”. We will have to support her, and support asylum seekers, in every way possible, against the pressures, not only of the Home Office establishment, but also of the Tories and their media. And it must never be the case again that vulnerable people are bullied so that they are afraid to ask for medical help. That, among many other reasons, is why I and thousands of other people joined or rejoined the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. We saw a different future.
Asylum seekers ‘too afraid’ to seek NHS care, report says
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/28/asylum-seekers-too-afraid-to-seek-nhs-care-report-says?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
[1] Dealt with on their Merits: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:2678
Null and void? Not for these reasons, M’Lud
According to the Independent’s story below, Brexit may be declared “void” because of illegality and “multiple criminal offences” by Leave-supporting business people and politicians.
I doubt it. That’s not going to happen just because they told lies and broke the law. Lies and broken laws have littered political campaigning since it was invented. Most elections that any of us can remember could be declared “void” if the grounds were that porkies were told and crimes committed.
Moreover, in this particular case, Croft solicitors have definitely come up with the wrong solution. May, they tell us, must consider “how best to conduct another referendum”. This presumably means that, of all people, she and her cabinet must devise one where nobody tells porkies and nobody is a criminal.
Difficult. Not to say – no, I will say it – impossible.
There may be a case for another referendum. This isn’t it. This one seems to sit side by side with the one that says Leave voters “didn’t know what they were voting for”. Now, there’s disdain for you; there’s patronising. The people using this latest argument apparently think Leave voters didn’t know that politicians lie and business “leaders” break the law when it suits them. Give me a break.
The idea that we should have a referendum on the grounds suggested by this case should be greeted with a cascade of mockery and laughter.
Dodgy
Capitalism throws up all sorts of dodgy characters and some of them make a good living advising dodgy governments.
Enter Shanker Singham, former adviser on Brexit to Her Majesty’s government.
Whichever side of the Brexit argument you’re on, Shanker is bad news. His credentials are crap. He claimed in a Facebook profile, says The Guardian, that “he studied law at Oxford. However, his degree there was in chemistry.” Then there is a “biography”, “distributed by a former employer” (Sorry?) that says he assisted “governments in the early privatisations during the Thatcher administration”, yet his career began post-Thatcher (in 1992). Singham denies “that this could be misinterpreted”.
He’s right. It’s clear as day: in the words of Sir Robert Armstrong, Thatcher’s cabinet secretary about her, he was being “economical with the truth”.[1]
May didn’t take his advice. Instead her deal, he says, is “a damage limitation exercise”. That’s why he’s pissed off and touring the studios and editors’ offices. But in or out or somewhere in between, we should be worried. Because we need to find ways of holding governments to account for everything they do and for the way they do everything they do. We have had cause to lose trust in governments of all parties and in the machinery of government (the civil service). Labour governments had plenty of dodgy advisers and spin doctors (remember them?) It had a dodgy dossier that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (remember that?). What we need is an end to dodgy characters and dossiers that capitalism produces from the depths of its bowels like there’s no tomorrow. And for a start, we need some integrity.
Enter Jeremy.
[1]https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/two-moments-of-legal-genius-which-tell-you-more-about-malcolm-turnbull-than-anything-hes-ever-done-in-politics/news-story/99b294dda251d4c3b7de3a5240c1b42b
Just a couple of points about Brexit
The truth is that whether we leave the EU with May’s deal, without a deal, or with a deal that looks more or less like the status quo (which must surely be the real meaning of phrases like “on the same terms as we have at present”) or with some other deal, or whether we just say, “I know, let’s just stay in, it was all a mistake, sorry”, socialists and anyone who thinks another world is possible will still have a fight on their hands.
Jeremy Corbyn said that one of the reasons we should stay was to preserve the workers’ rights gained in the EU. And, sure enough, those rights have often been better in other European countries than in the UK. I worked as an English teacher in France in the first half of the 1990s, and I was gobsmacked to find that, not only was there the right to join a union, you had the right for it to be recognised by the boss. If you wanted a staff representative you just had to ask. If you wanted a union rep, ditto. If you wanted a union rep (and at our language school there were just two union members out of a staff of about 35) an official from the union (in our case the CGT) would come and set up the operation. It meant that the boss was legally obliged to have annual pay negotiations with the union reps, among other obligations. None of this was perfect, but it was a good deal better than the situation in Thatcher’s Britain at that time. And French workers in their unions had fought for such rights well before the EU was even a twinkle in anybody’s eye.
But none of it was permanent either. Even before I left in 1995, there were rumours that these rights were under threat of being removed. One of my students said, “If they try that, there’ll be another revolution!” But Macron has made the most determined attempt so far to weaken and remove those rights. But even before Macron, in 2016, as Corbyn was saying we should remain in order to preserve workers’ rights, the government under Socialist Party president François Hollande was tear-gassing workers demonstrating against its own attack on their rights, an attack prompted from within the EU itself. I wrote in a blog in 2016 that
what was interesting in terms of Jeremy Corbyn’s argument was the claim by Danielle Simmonet from the Parti de Gauche (Party of the Left). She argued that the proposed law was not just a proposal by the French government. It was concocted by the government, the bosses – and the European Union. The proposed law is a “demand” of Brussels, she said, and a “deal” made with the European Union institutions themselves.[1]
So we can stay in to preserve human rights if we like, but they will not simply require preserving but vigorously defending, and probably will have to be fought for all over again. The same goes for all other rights, “standards”, etc.
If we leave the EU we will, for dead certain, have to fight to defend and extend our rights. The state will oppose us because it is a capitalist state, and thus not our friend. Even if we get a Corbyn-led government we will have to fight for change. John McDonnell spoke at a meeting in London recently and talked of “transforming the state”. He said this transformation would involve all of us in our unions, our communities, our pressure groups, etc., and in the Labour Party. The process needed to start now, he said, and it would be at least 10 years before we would see real progress (or as he put it, “two terms”). Of course, the state will resist any such transformation and we will have to hold a Labour government accountable and constantly keep it on track. It will be under enormous pressure to backtrack, abandon the transformation and return to “business as usual”. This will be the case in or out of the EU.
My main reasons for voting Remain in the 2016 referendum were about migration. I felt vindicated when it seemed that just the act of voting and getting their required result made so many people feel they then had the right to perpetrate racist attacks. It’s a small world and there can be no xenophobia or racism, no talk of “them” and “us”. We need to fight for free movement, which must be seen as benefiting both those who move and those who stay put and welcome the movers. A UK that bolts the door or pulls up the drawbridge against the antiquated figure of “the foreigner” will move further and further to the right. It will be going nowhere I want to go and nowhere I want to live. So I will probably vote Remain again if asked, despite the unfriendly – no, that’s too weak, think what they did to Greece – the vicious nature of what Yanis Varoufakis calls “Europe’s deep establishment”.[2]
[1] Defending workers’ rights against the EU: https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/defending-workers-rights-against-the-eu/
[2] Adults in the Room: my Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment (2017), Vintage, London.
Attlee’s quiet humanity, Jewish refugees, and a warning against wishful thinking
There must be a whole lot of untold stories like this (see link below) about people and the Jewish children they gave shelter to at that time. Most of those people weren’t famous like Attlee. But it’s a good story about Attlee, who is often characterised as nondescript and not really a warm character. I puzzled about the game he played, mentioned here, where the kids had to guess the name of the figure on the coins. I thought surely it was obviously George VI, and would be the same each time they played it. But then I remembered that, as a child, the coins we had in the 1950s were not all George VI. There was George V, and even Queen Victoria’s head floating around. How many of them were valid currency I don’t know. Incidentally, my father always called Queen Mary (who lived a good few years after George V died) “the old queen”. The later meaning of that phrase, of course, he had no knowledge of! He also maintained that George VI was a Labour supporter, a kind of wishful thinking that has not yet died out: John McDonnell sometimes says the bankers and others are supportive of his plans for a National Investment Bank, higher taxes for the rich and corporations, union representation at work and workers’ part-ownership of their firms. I think he knows he will have a much harder battle on his hands when he becomes Chancellor than this suggests. I hope so.
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