Labour Conference – get MPs to pledge support for #NHSTakeback

MPs are signing the #NHSTakeback pledges: ask yours now!

Keep Our NHS Public and Health Campaigns Together, the umbrella alliance of independent organisations, are both supporting the #NHSTakeback initiative launched by We Own It. This is a simple 5-point plan inspired by and reflecting the demands of the NHS Reinstatement Bill – the legislation we need to take back our NHS fully into public ownership once again – out of the hands of privatisation – in the spirit of 1948.

The pledge also asks MPs to stand four-square behind a fully funded and well-resourced NHS with integrated Public Health and social care.

Amidst party conference season, NHS campaigners are down in Brighton the week of 23-27th September for Labour’s conference, the biggest ever.

The plan has strength in its simplicity and forthrightness – see it in full here 

Sponsors of the We Own It campaign

There are several major sponsors, all allies of KONP:

• Campaign for the NHS Reinstatement Bill
• Doctors for the NHS
• Keep Our NHS Public
• Health Campaigns Together
• NHS Support Federation
• OurNHS
• Socialist Health Association

Seventeen MPs pledged support for #NHSTakeback in the first 2 days

Sixteen Labour MPs and Caroline Lucas, the stalwart Green MP have pledged already. The Labour Shadow Health team is considering how to approach our plan. We hope they will be able to publicly support it. We are optimistic that this will be a rallying cry strengthening the basic demands to stabilise, reinstate and nurture our NHS. The plan is for:

• a fully funded and well-resourced NHS
• where funds go to public services not private companies
• with the Government and the Secretary of State for Health owning up to full responsibility to provide high quality NHS service in the founding spirit of the NHS
• this will ensure our NHS delivers comprehensive care to our population, integrated with public health and social care
• and an end to market forces and private companies displacing our core NHS clinical services, including the supporting clinical teams such as pathology, and the vital supporting non-clinical teams such as catering, cleaning, portering and security.

This would mean halting Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), focused on saving wildly irresponsible amounts of £22bn in annual funding by 2020/21; reversing the market forces that dominate; investing to stabilise and allow the NHS to recover – including morale of NHS staff battered by overwork and capped pay; and a halt to ‘accountable care systems’ and organisations (ACSs and ACOs) that are finance driven not clinically. These will be superseded by health teams working together with local authorities delivering truly integrated health and social care.

Download the pledge – ask your MP to sponsor it

Please go to WeOwnIt and read the pledge.

Get your copy here and ask your MP to sign it – write to or visit your MP and ask her or him to sign up.

 

Help us build momentum behind this campaign to take back the NHS fully into public ownership, where management serves the public service and all clinical services are publicly provided – paid for from public funding, available universally to people in England and comprehensive in its coverage of need.

It will be true to the founding vision of 1948 (see photo). Released from the conscious undermining and deliberate defunding policies of the ideologues, and freed from wasteful and immoral profit-making from ill-health, it will evolve as it has always done to meet the ever-changing needs of our population with its guiding principles of social solidarity.

The basis for the pledge is the NHS Reinstatment Bill – read more about that here.

Tony O’Sullivan