Posted in Older People

Meeting our future health challenges

Save our NHS, nurse image by Chris MillettThe NHS will be at the heart and soul of Labour’s General Election campaign. We have lost five years, as the Coalition’s top down reorganisation has left the NHS unprepared to meet the health challenges of the 21st Century.

The current NHS crisis is rooted in the Government’s decisions to make cuts to adult social care, abolish NHS Direct, they have closed almost one in four walk-in centres, and their reckless reorganisation diverted resources away from frontline services. In these circumstances patients have little option but to present at A&E when the government reduce access to and the number of primary care services. The current A&E crisis is a warning that there are failures elsewhere within the health system. Continue reading →

Benneconomics – a tribute

arguments for socialismI got to know Tony Benn well when I worked as a researcher to the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs in the mid-2000s. I’d first met him when he was about to stand down from Parliament “to devote more time to politics“, a promise which he fulfilled. He filled venues around the country with his “Audience with …” one-man shows, and maintained his prominence as an anti-war campaigner through his presidency of the Stop the War Coalition.

But perhaps the most unexplored aspect of his life has been his contribution to economic thinking for democratic socialists. While no economic theorist or econometrist, Tony Benn emphasised the need for political theory to inform economic policy. Continue reading →

Intersectionality and Postmodern Feminism

intersectionality-illustrated1We left the last post having worked through the basic conceptualisation of intersectionality. If you can’t be bothered to trudge through its thousand or so words, simply put it is the appreciation of how different oppressions rooted in ostensibly discrete sets of violent (symbolically and physically) social relations can intersect and condition the lives of whole groups of people. Furthermore, activists involved in social struggles have to be conscious of and fight against the replication of oppression within discourses and movements committed to liberation. For example, feminism has to be alive to the possible marginalisation of black and minority ethnicity women, disabled women, and so on within the women’s movement.

There are some issues with this, not least the pathological forms of identity politics that have become indistinguishable from intersectionality in the eyes of many participants and observers of the relevant debates. What strikes me, however, is how none of these debates are nothing new. Historical debates within feminism since the 60s were characterised by the “classical” distinctions between liberal, socialist and radical feminisms which, in the 80s and 90s, were followed by critiques attacking unconscious ‘race’, class, cis-gendered, and heteronormative biases, and a valorisation of doubly/triply etc. oppressed experiences of womanhood, are visited and revisited by today’s ‘third wave’ feminism. This is less a ‘second time as farce’ repetition, even if the chosen venues for such arguments are Facebook and Twitter feeds, and more a cycle reflecting the persistence (or the perception of persistence) of really existing issues. Continue reading →

Let’s tackle future pensioner poverty now

elderly people crossingMy brother-in-law is a builder and turned 60 last year. He is physically fit for his age, I almost bought him a ‘Congratulations you’re 50’ card by mistake. However he is not likely to be able to sustain his highly physical job for another five or six years; certainly not for a decade.

When I have argued publically that firefighters should be able to continue to retire early on the grounds of not being fit enough to do the job without losing a considerable amount of their pension, most people have broadly been in agreement. The Government’s attempt to use envy when ministers point to the fact the pension age for firefighters would still be lower than for the general working public doesn’t wash with most people. They would rather be carried out of a burning building by someone who is up to the job. Continue reading →

How is this avalanche of cuts really hitting the poor?

My own constituency, Oldham West, is one of the poorest in the country. How are they being affected by the cascade of cuts? Housing benefit cuts in April will particularly impact on pensioners, families on low incomes, disabled people (many already traumatised by Atos assessments of their alleged capability for work), the long-term sick , and the jobless. The so-called bedroom tax will hit those classified as ‘over-occupying’ their property. People with 1 bedroom more than they are supposed to need will have their housing benefit cut by 14%, and with 2 bedrooms more than they need a cut of 25%. This will affect about 2,000 households in Oldham. Moving to a smaller property will be difficult because of the housing shortage (there are 8,500 on the waiting list in Oldham) and because of the priority given to homeless people. Continue reading →