Nottingham City NHS and the cuts – a healthworker speaks out

Source: Notts Black Arrow - Nottingham & Nottinghamshire AF group's blog

The below is something a member of Nottingham AF wrote for the Notts SOS blog giving an outline of what is happening locally within his workplace, the local NHS community healthcare services.

A Nottingham NHS worker speaks frankly about his, his workmates’, and his family and friends’ situations under the continuing threat of cuts that will no doubt be familiar to many others, and urges everyone to get involved with Notts SOS.

I work in one of the support services within the Nottingham NHS Citihealth organisation. We provide community health services to the Nottingham area. We have heard the current government promise to ring fence frontline health spending, however the reality on the ground is somewhat different.

Due to an ever increasing number of service users the very modest budget increases in the upcoming years do not allow us to maintain the current level of service provision. Frontline services have been cut despite political promises to the contrary. The community podiatrists have recently had an approximate 15% reduction in staffing; resulting in over 200 complaints in the last couple of months from angry service users who were informed they were no longer eligible for treatment and new patients unable to get initial appointments. Also a number of support staff in the trust HQ are currently in the process of being made redundant. Redeployment is unlikely especially with the current recruitment freeze that sees staff retiring not being replaced.

In our workplace, Ingeus, a private sector employment services company (who are also currently expressing an interest in the ‘work for your benefits’ workfare pilot in Manchester), have been brought in to try and arbitrarily reduce sickness and absence rates that are already well below the NHS average. All those earning over £21,000 a year will have a pay freeze, while all those earning less than this will get a mere £250 a year increase. For me this works out at a 1.5% rise in earnings this year, with the RPI inflation index running at 4.6% currently, this is a real terms pay cut for every single person who works here for the next two years.

People I speak to at work are extremely worried about the future; the constant reforming of the organisation over the past decade has left morale extremely low. Many people have felt that there is absolutely no security in the health sector even before the current crisis that is certainly well founded with the government having put aside a pot of £2 billion for upcoming redundancies this year. To add to this the 3,000 staff employed by the trust are also currently in the process of a Labour introduced initiative called ‘Transforming Community Services’. This initiative aims to finally separate commissioning from provision in the trust. What this boils down to is the organisation being a tiny core of public sector workers who purchase services from whichever private, social enterprise or charity choose to tender for the service. Very often this is the cheapest bidder. The NHS is in the process of becoming little more than a brand, one that hides the fact that sometimes you are being treated by a private company. This is a model you can expect the government to try and replicate across many services, indeed Suffolk County Council are looking to do this to every last one of their services to slash costs.

Though not fully clear what the implications of this development are at this stage, what we are likely to see is deterioration in the quality of services, as companies seeking to cut corners in order to make profit become more and more a reality in the healthcare sector. This is also part of the race to the bottom in wages and terms and conditions as we are all forced to compete with each other to be the cheapest and work the hardest in order to keep our jobs. The more people who are unemployed the greater this pressure will be and with predications of massive redundancies to come this pressure will grow ever greater, something that affects everyone of us. There are also possible pension implications with staff being transferred to non NHS organisations, as well as issues with trade union recognition if the workforce is split into many small chunks.

Outside of work my rent has gone up 10% this year as the number of people buying mortgages stagnates, pushing up prices. If I do get made redundant my reemployment prospects look fairly dismal. In June to August this year were 467,000 job vacancies created and 2,448,000 unemployed people. That’s 5.2 people per job and this is before the vast majority of the cuts start to appear.

My mum is currently in the process of losing her admin job at the local regional development agency. As an admin worker in the current labour market in her 50s will face a grim time finding a new job. My dad is on disability allowance and faces increasingly stringent and unfair pressure on him as the government seeks to slash the claimant count and reduce benefits. With the current cap on housing benefits being forced to sell his house could become a real possibility. Anecdotally my friends all tell me there is increasing pressure for them to work outside their contracted hours unpaid with little prospect of a pay rise and I can’t think of anyone I know who doesn’t have some form of debt be it mortgage, overdraft and credit card. Some have already lost their jobs including one who was forced to move back in with her parents when the City Council withdrew funding from Action for Children, a charity which provided various therapies to young victims of child sex abuse, forcing it to close. The council no longer has a dedicated service specifically for helping child sex abuse victims. They are now seen by the already overstretched local social services and mental health services.

I would urge all staff and all the service users to get involved with the Notts SOS campaign, that is all those who have midwives, health visitors, podiatrists, district nurses come to their homes or have their blood taken, have tried to give up smoking using the NHS, use the continence service, the contraception and sexual health advice or health shop services. We didn’t cause these cuts, so why should we be paying for them?

This is a transcript of a speech given at Hackney Pride by Jamrat Mason, one paragraph was not in the original speech for reasons of time, it has been included below in italics.

My name is Jamrat Mason and I have a vagina.  I'm involved in East London  Community Activism but today I'm here to speak “as a trans person” about transgender issues.  The term “transgender” is a broad term that refers to to a massive spectrum of people who in some way veer away from the gender written on their birth certificate.  So, I cannot, in any way whatsoever, be representative of transgendered people.  I can only talk about the world as I see it, from where I'm standing, as a transexual.

I'm a lucky tranny.  First of all because I'm alive.  And secondly because I have a family who loves me.  That shouldn't be lucky, but at the moment, it is.  My own experience is quite unique so I thought I’d give you a quick history:  At 3 years old my first sentence was “I'm a boy”, at 7 years old when I was still convinced that this was true, my parents took me to a psychologist.  The psychologist said I probably have “Gender Dysphoria”.  My parents talked to my school and allowed me to cut my hair and wear a boy's uniform.  When I was 8   I was referred on to a specialist in London (on the NHS) who I saw until I was 18.  When I was 12 I legally changed my name which my granny paid for.  So I've been living as male since I was about 7 or 8.  I went through a full female puberty and eventually got testosterone when I was 21.  I had surgery when I was 22.  I'm 24 now so I've looked like this for about 2 years.

Read more: Hackney Pride Speech

Class-struggle libertarian magazine from Peru's Unión Socialista Libertaria is now available. If you speak Spanish, get it from their website. The full announcement, including contents, in English is at Anarkismo.

The second issue of our libertarian, class-struggle magazine is now being distributed. "¡Avancemos!" is a mouthpiece for those sectors of the people who struggle and a tool for social and revolutionary transformation.

Sam of Sheffield Group has been disassociated from the Anarchist Federation due to a pattern of serious sexual misconduct. Sam committed a sexual assault upon one of our members. In different circumstances, he has been extremely manipulative and dishonest towards a comrade when trying to set up a sexual situation. Furthermore, when engaged in a relationship he has behaved in an emotionally and sexually oppressive manner. We are also aware of several other instances of sexual harassment that have taken place.

We are writing this statement because we wish other groups and individuals to be aware of Sam's behaviour, to be safe from him and to ensure that he works towards changing this behaviour. We deplore the fact that sexual harassment still exists within the Anarchist movement and believe that it must be challenged wherever it appears.

Our hope is that Sam now takes steps to relearn how to relate to other people and takes responsibility for his behaviour. When a harmful act is committed the perpetrator takes power away from the survivor. Any response must involve restoring the balance of power, not about ‘making everything OK again’ - to do so would be impossible.

As a first step in this process, which has been led by those affected, Sam has been asked to produce a statement of his own acknowledging what he has done, outlining the steps he intends to take independently, and committing himself to the process. We anticipate asking him to take further action. We feel strongly that those who are close to Sam should not be held responsible in any way for his behaviour.

It has been requested by those affected by Sam’s actions that AF members do not comment on any discussion following this statement. If a response is needed it will come through a mandated delegate, following discussion with those involved (Claire - bringyourownpetyahoo.co.uk ).

On Sat the 3rd Leeds Anarchist Federation called a meeting for an Antifascist Coalition in Leeds with the intention of discussing the EDL and ideas for how to respond to their plans to march in Bradford in August. The people attending the meeting were aware of the EDL's intention to attack the meeting but decided to go ahead with it anyway. Preparations were made for this possibility with the intention to try to de-escalate first, as a fight in the Swarthmore Center was in no way what we wanted, and we were prepared for other eventualities should a de-escalation fail. However, this predicted attack never materialised.

What did happen was that 5 unknown people arrived. The door was locked and so they rang the buzzer and waited. They claimed to be antifascists wanting to go to the antifascist meeting. When they came in one of them told us they were antifascists from Wakefield and asked us what we were going to do about the EDL. Two of them stood nervously in the doorway and the others sat down, one of them went and sat quietly at the other end of the room from his friends. We asked why they wanted to confront the EDL and they said because some of them are racist. We tried to question them further about this but it seemed that the guy doing most of the talking didn't feel he was doing a very convincing job. He said "You know who we are, don't you?", so we asked who and he said they were the EDL. At this point, a number of people in the meeting stood up and positioned themselves more conveniently, so this man started insisting they didn't want a fight and they were just here to explain that they weren't racist. He insisted repeatedly that he was just here to talk and made numerous defensive bids for acceptance ("don't tar us all with the same brush", etc). They seemed to be more concerned about PR than anything else but the brief exchange we had with him was predictably ridiculous and it wasn't the time or the place to discuss what he wanted so we asked them to leave and after a few repetitions of "But just let me finish...", they did.

Despite being less of an attack and at most a mild inconvenience, it is in the interest of this man, called Snowy, to exaggerate this incident and his role in it as much as possible. Since the rooftop protests in Dudley he's been trying to rise higher in the ranks of the EDL and is obviously hoping that he and his faction will gain more credibility if he makes it in and out of an antifascist meeting unscathed (no matter how this was accomplished). Snowy's political ambitions are pretty transparent and his attempts to make his strange behaviour look impressive are equally transparent.

The politics of the EDL feed into an agenda that poses a threat to the unity of the working class and has to be confronted. All over the world the bosses and politicians are using the recession to attack the working class using the nationalist rhetoric that "we're all in this together", while the EDL serve to focus concerns away from these attacks onto immigrants and foreign culture, simultaneously encouraging the white working class to identify with the white ruling class in an act of pseudo-rebellion that only serves to undermine their own interests. Although the EDL is not a fascist organisation, their presence on the streets of Bradford will only serve to strengthen the division of the working class according to tribalist principles of ethnicity and culture. Having said this, testosterone laden politics that responds with merely street violence fails to adequately address the situation. Our response has to be in accordance with our political aims.

Anarchist Federation Leeds