Tagged with National Policy Forum

NPF Responses – Health

The National Policy Forum’s consultation on Health and Social care is set in the firm context of an underfunded health and social care service. This is correct. However, the document is insufficiently clear about the need to reverse the general direction of travel and fails to give enough indication about Labour’s alternatives. In the rest of this article I have tried to combine two articles in one both commenting on and proposing changes to the draft. Most of what follows consists of suggested amendments/additions to the draft. The passages in italics are my comments on the draft.

Every organisation has scope for some savings, reform and doing things better including the NHS. But this should not obscure the fundamental truth that the funding crisis in  UK health and social care is also part of an ideological drive to reduce the role of the state as all our key public services. Linked to this is the equally ideologically driven policy of diversifying public service provision to include the corporate and for-profit sector in care delivery. And as our public services come under more and more pressure, those who can afford it will resort to “better” private care provision and so create further momentum to undermine  the social solidarity that is at the heart of our welfare state and public sector. Continue reading →

What’s in the NPF draft policy statements?

According to the Labour Party Rulebook:

“Party conference shall decide from time to time what specific proposals of legislative, financial or administrative reform shall be included in the Party programme. This shall be based on the rolling programme of work of the National Policy Forum.” (Emphasis added)

The results of that “rolling programme of work” emerge at this time of the year giving members a few weeks to read and discuss them and to get their party branches and CLP to respond. It’s a tight timetable and there is room to doubt the value of the consultation that this purports to be. Continue reading →

What is the National Policy Forum Doing? The Case of Education

angelaraynerlabconf3The National Policy Forum (NPF) is the body where Labour Party Policy is developed (or so the LP Rulebook tells us). It presents reports to Labour’s Annual Conference each year and these are supposed to be the basis for Labour’s next election manifesto. The first thing to be said is that, if the talk within Labour of getting into gear for an early general election is sincerely meant, then it would have appear not to have reached the ears of the organisers of the NPF or its constituent Policy Commissions.

After 6 years of onslaught on our education service in which the majority of secondary schools have been ripped out of the sphere of local democracy to become state-funded independent institutions, a period in which teacher training has been undermined and in which great strides have been made towards various forms of privatisation of education, what does Labour have to say in response? Continue reading →

Martyn Cook reports from November’s National Policy Forum

Inside Labour CorbynDespite having been elected to the NPF as a Scotland CLP rep in 2015, the first full NPF meeting only took place on the 19th and 20th of November in Loughborough.

It was a very general meeting and was more focussed on identifying priority issues for the coming months and years. This report is therefore lighter on policy details than may be expected, but instead focuses on ways for you as a member, your CLP, or other affiliated body to get involved in the policy making process. Continue reading →

Putting members in charge of the Party: are we up to it?

IsTheLeftUpToItBI remember a television programme about the death penalty many years ago in which the Governor of a US state (I can’t remember which) said that the death penalty was supported by the majority of voters and that therefore it required no further justification. That is one view of democratic power and voting: the rule of the people as a summation of popular prejudice. Continue reading →