Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt

On 5 September 2019, I was honoured to read out a statement on behalf of Save Our NHS in Kent (SONiK) to a full meeting of Thanet District Council. This draws attention to the imminent dangers facing our stroke unit and calls upon councillors to help in averting them. You can read the full statement below and on the SONiK website.

Everyone in this room should be aware that local health commissioners have decided to close the stroke unit at QEQM hospital. 

SONiK believes this decision has been taken in an attempt to save money rather than to address local need. 

People in Thanet are more likely to suffer a stroke, and be hospitalised as a result, than people in more affluent parts of Kent. SONiK believes it’s irresponsible to take health services away from those who need them most. 

We also fear that, if the stroke unit is allowed to close, this will be followed by other services – like the A&E and consultant-led maternity – and that QEQM will be seriously downgraded.

Working with the legal team that successfully challenged the downgrading of Lewisham Hospital, SONiK has prepared a case that will be heard in the High Court (likely in early December). We’re asking for QEQM to be considered as one of four sites for a hyper-acute stroke unit.

We had planned to ask you today to donate £5,000 to the £15,000 community contribution we were asked to raise by the Legal Aid Board. However, our fundraising efforts have been so successful that we don’t need to ask you for a contribution at this point. But we hope to be able to come back to you if the case goes to appeal.

For now, we want to alert you to three very serious points and to ask for help.

Firstly: The hospital trust is refusing to put in place measures to prevent early closure of the QEQM stroke unit, as happened recently in Tunbridge Wells. If our stroke unit closes before the promised new facility is ready at Ashford (2021 at the earliest), we’ll suffer the double whammy of having to travel further for the same service. 

We call upon TDC councillors to support us in asking the hospital trust to introduce incentives to prevent stroke staff from leaving before the new unit opens. 

Secondly: In order to judge the impact of time-critical conditions being treated outside Thanet, we need accurate end-to-end data that show what happens when 999-call patients have to travel further to access acute care.

We call upon TDC councillors to join us in asking the hospital trust to start recording these data as part of the Kent Stroke Review and the East Kent NHS reconfiguration.

Thirdly: In SONiK’s view, the stroke scrutiny process carried out by Kent County Council’s Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee was deeply flawed. An off-the-record meeting took place on 7 May between HOSC members and NHS champions of the stroke plans. Two councillors reversed their decisions as a result of this meeting, but the public will never have access to what was claimed or promised. This is neither accountable nor transparent. 

We call upon TDC councillors to make an official complaint to KCC and to ask them to commit to the eradication of private meetings from future scrutiny processes.

On 30 August 2019, an impromptu demonstration was arranged outside the office of South Thanet MP, Craig Mackinlay, to protest against the Government’s decision to shut down Parliament for five weeks. Despite the short notice, many people of many political persuasions came to register their disapproval that the Prime Minister is suspending democracy to force through a no-deal Brexit.

I was pleased that my words were quoted extensively in articles published here and here:
“We’re here today because we believe in democracy. I don’t want the people of Thanet to think that we’re trying to block Brexit. Thanet voted resoundingly to leave the European Union, and the Labour Party have always respected the result of the referendum. We want to help restore sovereignty to parliament; suspending parliament is the exact opposite of that. Boris Johnson, who claims to want to restore democracy to parliament, is actually taking the power away from the people.”

A month ago, Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and put together a terrifyingly right-wing cabinet. The ideological vultures began to circle.

For decades, think tanks have attempted to shape government policy. Margaret Thatcher was notoriously wedded to the free-market ideas of the Institute of Economic Affairs. More recent Conservative governments have been influenced by the misleadingly named Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).

Iain Duncan Smith set up the CSJ in 2004 after his stint as Leader of the Conservative Party. The think tank claims to want ‘to put social justice at the heart of British politics and make policy recommendations to tackle the root causes of poverty’. The CSJ believes this is possible by reducing our economic dependence on the state.

Just before Duncan Smith became Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the CSJ published an upbeat-sounding report called Dynamic Benefits: Towards welfare that works, which introduced what it called the ‘Universal Credits scheme’. This informed the catastrophic introduction of Universal Credit. Many families in South Thanet have been made homeless as a result of delayed payments, and the majority of claimants are worse off than they were under the previous system.

On Saturday, the CSJ published the cheerily titled Ageing Confidently: Supporting an ageing workforce. This report recommends that the state pension age be raised to 70 by 2028 and to 75 by 2035. If the government adopted this plan, it would be disastrous for South Thanet.

In Cliftonville West, South Thanet’s poorest ward, men at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum can expect to live to 69.6. Under these plans, by 2028 these men would die six months before receiving their state pension. The average overall life expectancy in Cliftonville West is 74.5. If these plans were fully implemented, our poorest residents would die six months before they were due to receive their pension. The situation is even worse in Margate Central in North Thanet, where average life expectancy is just 72.7.

Ros (now Baroness) Altmann, who was Minister for Work and Pensions under Duncan Smith, has described the proposals as ‘chilling and immoral’. The Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, has condemned the idea of expecting people to ‘work until they drop’. We have seen the devastating impact of raising the state pension age on women born in the 1950s. The same dire mistake must not be repeated in the rest of the population.

The Labour Party will always be on the side of pensioners and help ensure security and dignity for older people in retirement. Labour will reject any Conservative proposal to extend the state pension age beyond 66, and we will increase the state pension to keep pace with earnings or inflation, whichever is higher. Voters must bear this in mind at the next General Election.

In a very worrying development, privatisation of the NHS may be entering a whole new phase. Private contractors are being offered the opportunity not just to provide services but also to commission them. This involves £2bn of mental health, learning disability and autism services. Read more here and here.

Labour’s Shadow Minister for Mental Health, Barbara Keeley, is spot on when she says ‘We have seen too many examples of private providers cutting corners, and not giving service users the support that they need. There is a real danger that any greater involvement for private providers means that a focus on the person using services is lost. It is not acceptable for private hospitals to be involved in commissioning decisions for services for which they are bidding’.

I was immensely proud to speak at Save Our NHS in Kent’s demonstration of support for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Thanet. The written version of my speech follows.

Those of you who know me know that I don’t often wear blue in public, but this is one group and one campaign for which I’m proud to wear blue.

We’re here today to give our hospital a hug.

It needs our love and support at the moment, because it’s vulnerable – vulnerable to cuts and to closures.

Today it’s the stroke unit; tomorrow it could be our A&E.

Closing wards and downgrading hospitals is a travesty anywhere, but even more so in Thanet.

People are more likely to have a stroke here than in more affluent parts of Kent and more likely to be admitted to hospital as a result.

We probably all know someone who has had a stroke locally.

I know a man in his early 50s, a father, who had a stroke that left him unable to drive and severely affected his plumbing business and his family life.

Stroke can be devastating, and the one thing we know about stroke is that it must be treated FAST.

Closing our stroke unit is not just inconvenient. It’s dangerous and, we believe, illegal.

With the help of every single person who has donated to the fundraising campaign, Save Our NHS in Kent will be challenging this decision in the high court.

Now, I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t say that our two local MPs have been less than effective when it comes to our stroke unit.

They’ve both flip-flopped between supporting and opposing its closure, but done very little in real terms to prevent it from happening.

They won’t and they can’t do more because it’s the policy of their Government to centralise health services and to starve them of funds.

Our new Prime Minister is very friendly with Donald Trump. During his state visit to the UK, Trump said that the NHS would be ‘on the table’ in any trade deal between the UK and the US in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

That, I fear, is the ultimate plan – to take us out of the European Union with no deal and to make us reliant on trade deals with America that include the more profitable parts of our beloved NHS.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

During the last General Election, the Labour Party pledged to halt the closure of all hospitals and wards.

If we had a Labour Government now, we wouldn’t be in this position.

I was proud to wear this blue t-shirt in a sea of red at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool last year, together with several of the people here today, including Councillor Gregory and Councillor Farrance.

We met Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Jon Ashworth, who told us he supports our campaign and promised to come and visit.

So there’s still plenty to fight for.

Together, we will challenge the decision to close the stroke unit.

Together, we will resist our NHS being sold off.

Together, we will hold the Government to account.

Thank you.