Can English health policy be advanced through signing petitions?

Today, the intensity of opinions of some parliamentarians in spitting bullets at 38 degrees was incredible.

In case you’ve missed what they were talking about, here it is.

Here was the first blast at ’38 degrees’.

Paul Burstow:I start by acknowledging the receipt of a petition handed to me yesterday, containing 159,000 signatures collected by members of 38 Degrees, expressing their concerns about the matter we are debating today. I know that a great many Members will have received e-mails about that and will have their own opinions, and I want to discuss the issues.

David T. C. Davies:Will the right hon. Gentleman refresh my memory? Is that the same pressure group that a few years ago was saying that the NHS was going to be privatised, which is completely untrue, and which a couple of months ago was saying that it was about to be silenced by some Bill the Government were pushing through yet is now very noisily campaigning once again? Surely this cannot be the same completely unreliable group of left-wingers with links to the Labour party, can it?

And then there was more.

David T. C. Davies:

I listened with great interest to my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) but I will be supporting the Government 100% tonight because I have great confidence in what the Government have achieved with the NHS. I say that because I have seen the alternative; I have seen what has happened to the NHS when it is run by Labour, because that is the problem that I and many of my constituents face at the moment in Wales.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) came forward earlier with a petition from the left-wing pressure group 38 Degrees. Health campaigners today have been talking today about the amount of salt that we take but one has to take dangerously large pinches of salt with anything that comes out of that organisation. These people purport to be a happy-go-lucky students. They are always on first name terms; Ben and Fred and Rebecca and Sarah and the rest of it. The reality is that it is a hard-nosed left-wing Labour-supporting organisation with links to some very wealthy upper middle-class socialists, despite the pretence that it likes to give out.

It is 38 Degrees who were coming out with all sorts of hysterical scare stories a few years ago about how the Government were going to privatise the NHS. It took out adverts in newspapers, scaring people witless that that was going to happen. Of course the organisation has forgotten all about it now because there was never any intention to do that. We will never privatise the NHS because we believe in public services in this party. A couple of months ago, 38 Degrees came out with more scare stories about how it was going to be gagged because of another piece of legislation that the Government were putting through to bring about fairness in elections. It said that we would never hear from it again, and yet here we are a few months later with yet another host of terrible stories, scaring members of the public quite unnecessarily. I do not think that we have to take any lessons from 38 Degrees, nor hear any more about their petition.

But are petitions are good thing?

Critics of petitions say that petitions are too easy to organise because of the automated nature of mailing lists these days. Because of the ease in producing a petition, it can be easy to inundate people with many petitions, thus making it difficult to work out which are the genuine causes.

Consequently, due to ease of producing petitions, some feel that the volumes of signatures need to be massive before any impact is made.

And even if petitions have a large number of signatories, it can be the case that their effects are short-lived. After amassing many signatures for months for the #WOWpetition, the parliamentary debate was barely covered in the media; and there appeared to be little consequence from it.

Likewise, there was little coverage of the clause 119 debate on the BBC News 24 ‘rolling news’ service. Nonetheless, it did manage to surface as a web news story on the BBC News website.

The frustration for members of the general public is that many parliamentarians don’t appear to be listening.

There’s an inevitability about votes in parliament, where the arithmetic means that votes can be won completely divorced from the quality of the debate.

And parts of the debate were bad. Dr Dan Poulter’s debating content was incoherent, badly structured and full of ectopic odd partisan point-scoring. The style was vulgar and offensive, like a junior doctor presenting a garbled and incoherent history within the constraints of a long medical ward round.

Many Labour MPs, not least the Shadow Secretary of State for Health Andy Burnham MP, were clearly more than mildly irritated at the grotesque depiction of the clause 119 policy as a natural extension of Labour’s policy.

Grahame Morris, MP for Easington, made as ever excellent comments. Along with Andrew George MP, he is on the influential Health Select Committee. And yet Morris was given rather odd replies by Simon Burns MP and Stephen Dorrell MP, head of the said committee, which did not take the debate much further.

Burstow, a Liberal Democrat who is likely to lose his seat in 2015, produced an amendment and withdrew it. But being bought off (not literally) to chair a committee is apparently not uncommonplace for shennanigans such as these.

Jeremy Hunt MP in summing up used the term ‘whole person care’ which could be an unconscious display of waving the white flag when he could have simply said ‘integrated care’.

Throwing forward, it could be that clause 119 in some form could be just what the Dr ordered to facilitate the future reconfigurations necessary for implementation of integrated care in some form.

Patently Dorrell wishes to avoid the term ‘integrated care’, in calling it ‘joined up care’, to avoid any breach of EU competition law.

It’s trite to mention it, but the only petition that really counts is the General Election.

I received a direct message from somebody today to say ‘I am fucking fuming’.

He then asked, “Should I vote Labour or NHA Party?”

As they say – “the choice is yours”.

duncanenright

Vote Labour. Simple.
- http://gravatar.com/rotzeichen Mervyn Hyde
  
  Petitions are being used because the politicians are not listening, why? Because they have their own agenda.
  
  Whilst still remaining a member of the Labour Party I remain because of loyalty to fellow members that I have campaigned with since 1974. What most of those members though do not understand is that most Labour politicians are not socialists as they were when I first joined, instead they are neo-liberal.
  
  I have said this before on these threads, but I think it is important for people to hear again. I was invited to take part by my then Labour MP in a telephone conference with Gordon Brown just before the Banking crash, after hearing and listening to multiple doses of spin about what Labour wanted us to tell the public, I asked Gordon Brown why at that time he was in the process of privatising the Underground in London when the history of the private sector was so bad.
  
  His answer was unequivocal, he said, But Mervyn, “this is a Labour Privatisation.”
  
  Needless to say I do not campaign for Labour any more but am still a member hoping that members will wake up and sack the leadership that do not represent it’s members. This link reminds us who they are really working for: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/poll/2014/jan/19/are-we-all-capitalists-now-chuka-umunna#comment-30980799
  
  What most in this country do not understand is that politicians (Neo-Liberal) say that the government has no money to provide public services and so accept that private provision is the answer. The fact that the NHS is cheaper more efficient, and the most comprehensive system in the workld seems to escape those with that kind of assumption. Why would anyone run a race and pick the last person as the winner and the first as the loser?
  
  Labour reorganised the NHS into bite size chunks ready so that the private sector would be able to share it out amongst themselves in the pretense that competition will be cheaper in the long run, America of course is the antithesis to that formula. They set up the mechanism for the market to work by using private hospitals to carry out operations rather than expanding the facilities within the NHS.
  
  People do not understand that it is impossible for a government to run out of money, exemplified by Cameron who promised his Tory voters in Somerset that they would spend whatever it took to cure their flooding problems. “Money was no object.”
  
  For once I would agree with him money is no object, This academic explains why that is the case in general economic terms and that politicians who say differently are lying to you.
  
  Professor Stephanie Kelton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i7O791RkvU
  
  Once people understand that we can spend whatever we need for public services, then what is holding us back and why? Quite simply it is the Financial sector that makes it’s money out of selling debt, and who have the politicians in their pockets, Chuka Umnna has links with Goldman Sachs. The Tories get 50% of their contributions from Hedge funds and Banks.
  
  Banks need poor people to borrow money from them in order to make their profit, if people have enough money to save, they will not borrow from the Banks, hence the more that are indebted the more profit the financial sector can make. We are all working to make Bankers richer, and politics today are doing their bidding rather than serving the people they represent.
  
  If they served us rather than the Banks, there would be no need for petitions.
http://twitter.com/BankersRock Ian Crowther (@BankersRock)

Unfortunately, there is no co-ordinated response from the left backed by an established and trusted leader, supported by people in volume. This is one of the key reasons why the neoclassical establishment continue to plough the same furrow without fear of challenge or steering off course. The neoclassical econocrat and technocratic elite are firmly rooted in the power seat. It is the same economically in this financialised world – no willingness to change the way we operate despite the crisis and after effects we now face such as austerity that is massively affecting the NHS. The left must re-establish itself and quickly find somebody other than milliband to get us out of this mess – we need a true leader to unite behind.
http://www.handmadelancaster.co.uk Fliss Hawksworth

Perhaps the question should be, “Why are the views of the majority of the electorate being ignored?” Clearly those in power think losing the 2015 General Election is worth the risk associated with forcing through their agenda. We (the electorate) need to be able to challenge ideological extremes, short-termism, and ignoring the wishes of the populace more effectively in future. How can the capability to do this be integrated into our democracy in a legally binding way (as petitions are so obviously seen as a nuisance generated by the opposition rather than truly reflecting the population’s views)?

We have hitherto elected representatives in the hope that they will respond to, & reflect, our views. It seems that now, more than ever, MPs are towing party lines rather than representing their constituents’ interests. Perhaps a way forward is to have a half-term ballot to ascertain the electorate’s perception of policies in response to which adjustments must be made? Five years is too long for a government to ignore the population at large in my opinion.