Home » Labour Health Policy » It’s convenient if you think it’s an image thang, but Labour needs answers to big problems

It’s convenient if you think it’s an image thang, but Labour needs answers to big problems

Tags: Ed Miliband, image

By shibleyrahman in Labour Health Policy, NHS on July 27, 2014.

Miliband has indeed called the right shots on certain issues, such as phone hacking and energy bills, but he is wrong to think all of his woes are due to a fixation with image.

This is Ed Miliband who recently posed with a copy of the Sun newspaper remember, despite rather vociferous opposition of the Liverpool MPs in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster.

It’s pretty likely now that the Conservatives have screwed up in a sufficiently large number of areas for them not to be able to win an overall majority on May 8th 2015. This all leaves Labour looking as if it will be the largest party at least. The indictment list for the Coalition is massive: real problems in access to justice through the decimation of law centres, operational failures in access to acute medicine, the distress caused to disabled citizens through their withdrawal of disability benefits, and so it goes on.

And indeed it’s pretty likely now both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have done enough to lose the next general election.

But Miliband’s fixation on image is odd. It’s odd particularly he has always claimed he never reads the papers, like an aloof academic who never reads bad reviews of his work. The “I am not worried about my image” story presents an inherent paradox that Miliband is intensely worried about his image. But he should be worried about other things.

Labour is looking, policy-wise, in healthy shape. The UK Labour Party is relatively united, and the list of policy proposals look coherent.

But the Labour Party, like all parties, have ‘questions to answer’. It needs to answer whether it would be prepared to safeguard the NHS budget as the inequality gap gets bigger. If it is indeed the case that Greg Dyke, who considers himself reasonably well off, is happy to pay a larger amount of taxes to not have a NHS on its knees, should Labour be bringing that discussion openly to the public?

Labour says it cannot do much about the TTIP investor state dispute settlement negotiations as they’re being done in private, but Labour still gives an impression of being led by events not being in control of them. Likewise it is committed to negotiating a new settlement for PFI literally, not solely the problem of the Labour Party, but PFI does not seem to be a discussion out in the open. It clearly is not a niche subject when it can affect the reconfiguration of local hospitals.

And the general public are not convinced about the NHS being run on the model of a supermarket. Members of the public include disgruntled former employees of the NHS who have found the culture oppressive and stifling, with abuse of power by people in authority. And nothing much seems to change.

Ultimately there is always enough money for wars, and inquiries into war, and you never hear of the Prime Minister saying we can’t intervene because we’ve overspent our budget. People who used to vote Labour want some sort of ideological reassurance that the NHS will not be sold off to the highest bidder, and our utilities won’t be owed by foreign oligarchs. Yes, the left is capable of “doing” patriotism too.

For the record, I have never been one to dismiss the National Health Action Party or Keep Our NHS Public as cranky pressure groups who have no credibility in their mission. They are speaking up for massive faultlines in our NHS policy, and, whilst Labour is clearly speaking out against the current Government, many former Labour voters simply put their face in their palm when Miliband dismisses the problem as image.

It is not.

George Nieman

Someone said, ‘don’t mix the ‘NHS’ with the ‘economy’. The NHS is dependant upon the economy as is the pension schemes in our country. The answer we must all face no matter what our politics are is the simple fact that we must all pay a little more via taxation. Then it is essential that the extra is transferred to the NHS expenditure and not used for anything else. What better way is there?
- http://twitter.com/mjh0421 Mervyn Hyde (@mjh0421)
  
  George Nieman:
  
  Two points really,
  
  1. We do not have to raise taxes to pay for public expenditure, this is a fallacy that the establishment have always known but even Universities today wrongly educate economists over.
  
  Taxes are a means of destroying money, money is created out of thin air by the Banks, the Bank of England does not ever need to borrow money but does so to prop up the financial sector. Public expenditure can funded by the Bank of England to infinity, only people just do not understand because of the brain washing from so called financial experts that misrepresent the truth.
  
  For those in the know who defend the Financial sector say; that we can’t fund our public services like this because it would be inflationary, well how do we cure inflation today, and the fact is the Banks create money out of thin air day in day out, it is how the system works and if the Banks can do it so can the state. The fact is that today in the 21st century we are following economic principles that are hundreds of years old, we could be forgiven for being ignorant in the past, that should not be case today.
  
  This Guardian article provides a link to the Bank of England document that confirms what academics from the University of Missouri have been saying for a very long time now:
  
  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-money-iou-bank-of-england-austerity
  
  2. The NHS is an integral part of the economy, a healthy well population can remain productive and a positive benefit to the economy. When people need remedial care, minor operations the sooner they access care the sooner they become productive again.
  
  The NHS has massively contributed to the effectiveness of the economy, as those before the NHS came into being witnessed.
George Nieman

I don’t know where Mervyn thinks the money comes from for the NHS? It has to be via the wages of those in work.
http://twitter.com/mjh0421 Mervyn Hyde (@mjh0421)

George, I gave you a link to document that was drafted by the Bank of England; confirming what MMT, a group of academics at the University of Missouri have been saying for may many years now.

The facts are, that the Banks create money out of thin air every time they make a loan, that money was issued by electronic means today but has in the past been called “Fountain Pen transactions” due to the fact that they were written in banking ledgers instead of just printing notes, but to same effect as putting numbers onto accounts today.

The simple truths are that Banks make money from creating debt, the government through the Bank of England are the issuers of the currency, which means the state does not have to borrow money to pay it’s way.

That means if the state wants to pay for health care it can do so without limit.

The only thing stopping it is the politicians, they are in hock with the Financial sector who have kept this as a secret to serve their own selfish purposes. The Tories get 50% of their funding from the Financial sector.

New Labour liberalised the Financial Markets, you only have to read Gordon Brown’s 2006 Mansion House Speech to see just how deeply they were involved in the financial crash.

This is an extract from a statement written by Alan Greenspan:

“Central banks can issue currency, a non-interest-bearing claim on
the government, effectively without limit They can discount loans
and other assets of banks or other private depository institutions,
thereby converting potentially illiquid private assets into riskless
claims on the government in the form of deposits at the central bank

That all of these claims on government are readily accepted
reflects the fact that a government cannot become insolvent with
respect to obligations in its own currency A fiat money system, like
the ones we have today, can produce such claims without limit.”

Put simply we like the United states of America, have our own Central Bank and can finance our public expenditure, that in fact the deficit argument is a lie. What you should do is to challenge lying politicians that tell you otherwise.

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