Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt

AN OPEN LETTER TO CRAIG MACKINLAY MP

Dear Craig,

Labour created the NHS in the teeth of opposition from the Conservatives, who voted against the creation of a universal health service more than 20 times.

Your party has trashed the NHS; since 2010, when the Lib Dems and Tories came to power, the amount of NHS money being funnelled into private hands has more than doubled to over £9bn. A third of NHS contracts now go to private companies, and their failures have wasted millions of pounds of public money. That’s millions of pounds that could have been spent on caring for patients, or paying nurses properly.

But now I’m asking you to undo that damage. On behalf of every patient and NHS worker in South Thanet, on behalf of everyone whose family has ever been cared for here, I am asking you to support Labour’s amendment to the Queen’s Speech, so that the NHS will be brought back into the hands of the public – not corporations like IMH and Virgin Care, who sued the NHS.

We know what Boris Johnson thinks about the NHS – he has written about how having free healthcare is morally dangerous. He is desperate to do a free trade deal with Donald Trump – who said our NHS would be “on the table” in any such deal.

I hope you’ll do the right thing. Vote against your Party and its disgraceful record of selling off our NHS. Vote for what we both know everyone here in Thanet, Sandwich and the villages wants: that the health service is kept safe in the hands of the people.

Yours sincerely

Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt
Policy Officer, South Thanet Labour Party

The vulnerability of the Kurds in Northern Syria is turning into a humanitarian disaster. People are being attacked and killed on a daily basis.

On Sunday 20 October, I was proud to march with members of South Thanet Labour Party, Unite Community and the Kurdish community in Canterbury.

I spoke about the vital importance of Rojava as an exemplar of self government and feminism. We must do all we can to raise our voices in protest.

You are very welcome at the fundraiser, organised by Councillor Aram Rawf, in aid of Kurdish Red Crescent at the Red Hall in Broadstairs on Saturday 2 November 7:30–10pm. There will be Kurdish food and an open mic. Please bring a bottle.

At a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference on 30 September 2019, Boris Johnson announced that a new hospital will be built in Canterbury. This would mean the end of the Accident and Emergency unit and consultant-led maternity at QEQM hospital in Thanet.

There are currently three large district general hospitals in East Kent (one in Canterbury, the QEQM in Margate and William Harvey Hospital in Ashford). Health bosses plan to centralise acute care in East Kent as part of a major reconfiguration. So far, there are two options going to consultation.

Option one would see expanded, modernised A&Es at William Harvey in Ashford and QEQM as well as investment at Kent and Canterbury Hospital for improved diagnostics, day treatments and surgery.

Option two entails a new building in Canterbury where ALL of East Kent’s acute care will be delivered, meaning that large populations in Thanet and Ashford lose their A&E and consultant led maternity care (see attachment). Thanet is the second most densely population in Kent, and the second most deprived in all of the southeast. 

These two options are mutually exclusive. By supporting option two, the Prime Minister has effectively predetermined the outcome of what was meant to be a public consultation and condemned QEQM and William Harvey to drastically reduced services.

I was pleased to have my concerns quoted in this article:

“This announcement looks like it will spell disaster for Margate’s QEQM hospital and for Thanet.

“We must fight to keep A&E at QEQM, and to ensure that maternity consultants aren’t robbed from QEQM to be moved elsewhere.

“Thanet is an area of deprivation and needs these time-critical services, or lives will be put at risk.”

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.