Media and Labour’s opponents desperate to make Peterborough by-election all about Brexit. If voters see past it to real, everyday issues there is only one choice at ballot box on Thursday
Comment
With other parties and their media friends working overtime to turn this Thursday’s Peterborough by-election into a mini Brexit referendum and New Labour relics focusing on smears, it couldn’t be clearer that Labour’s opponents are desperate to fight the election on anything but the real-life, everyday issues the people of Peterborough face.
Soaring violent crime and foodbank use, plummeting real-terms wages and living standards and the stripping of services are just some of the realities Peterborough voters are being forced to cope with by Conservative policies that have left the city behind.
The area has also seen some of the more infamous effects of Tory predations on the NHS. Only nineteen miles away, Hinchingbrooke hospital was put into special measures after a private company withdrew from its contract to operate the hospital.
But those effects have also been felt closer to home. Peterborough City Hospital merged with Hinchingbrooke into a single NHS Trust – but has suffered ‘severe‘ bed shortages and was itself also placed into special measures and is still under special direction by NHS England after only managing to improve its Care Quality Commission rating from ‘inadequate’ to ‘requires improvement’.
With hospitals around the country being closed and many others struggling like Peterborough and Hinchingbrooke under the weight of Tory spending restraints and privatisations, strong GP services become even more crucial.
But GP services are falling apart, according to the British Medical Association – which has warned that most GP practices are on the very ‘edge of viability’, again because of serious under-resourcing by the Tory government.
But this is not accidental. NHS GP Dr Ameen Kamlana spoke to Channel 5 about the intolerable pressures and enormous damage being inflicted on GP services by government policies, ‘marketisation’ and underfunding – and the dangers that these pose to patients:
The people of Peterborough know as much as anyone about the damage done by Tory government – and they face a straightforward choice on Thursday if they want to combat that damage.
The LibDems eagerly aided and abetted the Tories in their assault the essential structures of our society. The Brexit party dare not publish policies for fear of exposing their Thatcherite foundations, while the Greens cannot offer any prospect of concerted action in Parliament, let alone of getting into government.
Only the Labour Party offers policies for real change for the better and can realistically get into a position to enact them.
Voters in Peterborough who want to see change need to reject the attempts of elites and their media allies to turn them into a skewed Brexit barometer and vote for the only option available to see that change take place: the Labour Party and their candidate Lisa Forbes.
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American ambassador laid it bare, NHS will be sold off to American Health Companies, if you aint got the insurance you will be refused treatment and put out with the rubbish, be prepared to sell your house to pay for medical care, then when thats gone !
NFU has today stated it would also be the end of British Farming and Food Standards,
No regulation and a race to the bottom to suit the spivs and thieves who make money in the casino economy
ask the millionaires supporting nigel and brexit party what was it that first attracted you to no deal brexit
Ask voters is this what you are for making the 1% richer and selling the economic prosperity of your kids down the plug hole
REALLY
Reality check time, Doug, and of course the tiresome self-confessed Lib Dem Troll, Joe. In, or out, of the EU, a continuing Tory government will contract out ever greater parts of our NHS services to private companies, be they nominally “British” like Virgin Care, or giant US Health companies. Being inside the neoliberal EU provides no protection whatsoever to continuing privatisation of the NHS . Indeed the entire thrust of EU Competition policy, including State Aid Rules, is to make it difficult for a government to RE-NATIONALISE entire nation-wide industries or services like the NHS, or our disfunctional, fragmented, railway network.
I have noticed lots of Remainers citing the US embassador’s recent comments as if they represented something new. Far, far, from it. That is the ongoing reality TODAY, under the Tories. Why do you think the EU secretly negotiated the , now frozen, TTIP Deal with the US , or successfully finalised the very similar CETA Deal with Canada ? Or passed the Railway Directive forcing all EU states to put their (usually very well run already under state ownership) rail systems out to private operating tender imminently . They do it to open all EU-wide currently state owned and run services and industry sectors even MORE to privatisation and globalisation. When will Remainers on the “Left” grasp that the EU is an organisational and legal framework transmission belt for ever MORE neoliberalism, not any sort of protection against it ? And that the so-called “European Parliament”, with its gravy train MEPs , is a completely powerless façade.
ONLY a Left Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn can turn this thirty year neoliberal tide. Which is why there is no limit to the lies spread and external and internal plotting and sabotage by the capitalist class and their ratty, poison-spreading, underlings (like the pathetic rash of Trolls on here constantly) across the MSM, and on our Party Right, to stop that happening.
I love the incisive intellectual analysis, whereby 70-80% of Labour support is provided by ‘trolls’!
You really couldn’t make up the deluded innumeracy.
“Ask voters is this what you are for making the 1% richer and selling the economic prosperity of your kids down the plug hole”.
It’s ironic that the most selfish people regarding the future well-being of society and the environment seem, in my experience, to be parents…
Absolutely. I saw an article from the Guardian on Facebook this morning which was just a free ad effectively advocating the voters of Peterborough to go vote for the Brexit Party. There wasn’t one mention of Farage’s other policy, privatisation of the NHS.
Anyone who thinks the EU has got a magic potion to stop the privatisation of the NHS is either seriously deluded, completely unaware about what’s been happening for the past 20 years or just a malicious idiot.
Who ” thinks the EU has got a magic potion to stop the privatisation of the NHS “, FFS?
Privatisation of the NHS is home-grown Tory stuff. The point is that *Brexit* aids the Tories by making the UK a client state of the US and its demands, rather than an equal partner in the EU.
Brexit will put our NHS in mortal danger. Leavers please think again!
More cynical utter garbage from that dual identity Troll, RH/JackT (funny how “they” post so closely together). As “reallyoldhippy” correctly states, the EU provides no protections whatsoever against the ever greater privatisation of our NHS. That the Trolls claim otherwise (and posture ludicrously in some faux Leftish or perhaps UKIPish Little Englander way as being terrified of the UK becoming a “US client state” as soon as Brexit happens) really shows their lying desperation. As my earlier post explains, the entire point of the EU’s Single Market competition rules is to encourage and facilitate ever greater privatisation of public services.
Breaking News Historical info for the Trolls – the UK has been a “client state” of US imperialism, and US Big Business, particularly in financial services , to an ever-increasing degree ever since the US saved our bankrupt Brit ruling class’s asses from certain defeat by the Nazis in WW2, and became the new global military and economic hegemon.
The NHS is in mortal danger from THE TORIES (and Lib Dems) , and Labour Right , and will be whether we stay in, or leave, the EU.
I’d say it was just as much the Red Army that “saved our bankrupt Brit ruling class’s asses from certain defeat by the Nazis in WW2”, but still…
I voted leave for the very simple reason we don’t have a manifesto until we get out,
its also correct that makes us more vulnerable to predators, be they USA, China or EU
good news is capitalism disappeared up its backside in 2007, only intervention from Brown and Obama kept brain dead system on life support
its called the great experiment, or the biggest Ponzi scheme the world has ever seen,
when it pops only a floating exchange rate will save us, only club left in bag
tings aint what they appear to be
SELL SELL SELL
Simply incorrect in terms of the WWII event timetable, and the the separate geographical reality of the war in the East and West, timfrom . Whilst the Red Army undoubtedly played the leading military combat role, and took the most casualties by far, in defeating fascism from 1941 to 1945, the Left, “Trot Left” as much as the few remaining old Stalinists, too often like to forget that UNTIL 1941 and the Operation Barbarossa Nazi invasion of the USSR , the USSR’s gangster Stalinist regime was little less than an active CO-BELLIGERANT with the Axis powers . The Molotov Ribbentrop Pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact of 1939 had secret protocols (revealed at Nuremburg) that not only divided Poland between Germany and the USSR, but divided future expected conquests in the Baltic states and Middle East up too. The German conquest of Western Europe was only possible because of huge raw material supplies, particularly OIL, from the USSR .
It was only US military and material aid that kept Britain and its Empire going on the Western Front until the USSR was forced to soak up most of the German war effort after 1941’s Barbarossa invasion – and then it was only the huge industrial might of the USA that secured victory on the Western front – and of course supplied absolutely huge quantities of military supplies to the USSR. The cost to the British of this US support was its entire gold reserves, and US bases all over its empire . The USA emerged from WWII as the new post British Empire primary global hegemon – despite the following decades of challenge from the Stalinist regimes of the USSR and its empire . The new role of the economically declining and financially bankrupt British Empire (as it slowly fizzled out post 1945 territorially) was indeed as a hyper loyal client state of US Imperialism.
To suggest that leaving the EU somehow plunges the UK into “US client state status” is to display an ignorance of postwar history. The UK financial sector today is little more than a branch office of the US industry. The buy-in of the UK ruling class to the EU regional economic bloc was always torn between the growing trade competition between the US economic zone and EU membership. This is a key component of the current fracturing in the UK ruling political class. Of course neither the pro EU or pro US factions actually disagree about the overall neoliberal direction they all want to continue on. The extreme Brexiter Tories, in the main, hail from the pro US side of the argument – but there is another , deeply destabilising element in the mix – which is the capture of the Tory Party financially particularly its Brexiter wing, by short-termist spiv hedge funds, who are simply using the Brexit impact on currency markets and shares to make huge speculative profits – particularly by “shorting” stocks and currencies. This bunch of parasitic capitalists have little interest in what happens to the UK after they have taken their speculative profits ! The gullible “return us to the all white Great Britain of the 1950’s, or even 1920’s ” fantasy of the bulk of the actual Tory Party’s very old membership is so adrift from the motivations of both the Brexiter and pro EU wings of the Tory leadership as to be laughably tragic !
“To suggest that leaving the EU somehow plunges the UK into “US client state status” is to display an ignorance of postwar history.”
I had a good belly-laugh at that reversal of the truth – as Big Fart graces our shores.
Ha’Penny could be Farage himself as he gets his ‘theoretical’ binoculars out to view flying pigs rather than face the reality.
A veritable chlorinated chicken – submerged in empty pseudo-left rhetoric – and still toxic.
The term ‘troll’ from his limited vocabulary takes on a wjhole new meaning in this exercise to disinfect US intentions.
P.S. Getting away from simply guffawing, t is worth noting that Penny is quite correct in many of the facts that he is relating about the post-war history of the US, Europe and Russia.
What is interesting is the way he assembles these facts into an incoherent collage when it comes to the current choices facing the UK – first admitting the existing role of the US, developed since the war – but then resisting the obvious truth that Brexit would dramatically enhance that power imbalance and reduce the UK to the status of a colony
The role of Russia seems to be left hanging in the air, with little consideration of the *now* era of the kleptocracy and Putin that currently already has much saliency in terms of the UK economy.
The counterpart to all this is to simply demonise the rest of Europe as *the* wicked evil stepmother in a world of rapacious predators.
What this incoherent fruit-cake salad amounts to in terms of practical policy is impossible to decipher – except as some totally fantastic notion of an impoverished UK buggering about in mid-Atlantic as an example of the future to the rest of the world.
Sorry, Skwawkbox, but Brexit will intrude and pollute – simply because a Party that can’t convince on that issue won’t be trusted to get the key domestic issues right or to have a grasp of technical detail.
That’s why we Remainers bang on about it – the lack of judgment in bowing to Tory policy pollutes any chance of getting out from under the Tories. By definition.
We forecast it; we saw it happen. : crap policy; crap result.
All the forecasts coming true as Trump slavers over the NHS as a nice little earner for his class.
That’s the real world.
It’s not just the NHS but the ‘whole UK economy’ under the microscope, looking for profit, as the Ambassador pointed out. Just as vital to Trump is access for their overproducing agriculture. Woody says we will be able to choose whether we buy American or British chicken and beef which is true except before long the cheap American product will flood our supermarkets and there will be little real choice. Meanwhile British agriculture will be in a bad place no longer subsidised by the EU and having to depend on short lived fickle hand outs which will be dependent on local voting intentions. They will unable to compete with cheap American imports, just as it was in the 1890’s. Nobody seems to be raising this but presumably farmers themselves are well aware of their uncertain future, maybe they’re not getting a shout in the current fetid atmosphere?
If any Remainers think the NHS will be safe if we stay in the EU, read this;
https://corporateeurope.org/en/power-lobbies/2017/06/creeping-privatisation-healthcare
and this;
https://healthcampaignstogether.com/pdf/Privatisation-in-all-its-guises.pdf
Any NHS campaigners out there will know John Lister is not a man to ignore.
If you’re trying to be offensive JPenney, at least get it correct. I’m a self-confessed Labour supporter, who left the Party to vote Green, and will shortly rejoin. You’ve probably voted Lib Dems the same amount of times as I have!!!! How many on here realise the Tories are in power!? Leaving the EU now, gives the Tories free rein to do whatever they want. Labour can’t get a chance of power until the Tories decide, or 2022; and, to do it, well have to get more than 14% of the vote! Even if you take into account the turnout, Labour still won’t poll 30% on the most recent performance in the EU poll.
To most of us on Planet Earth, the thrust of what you were saying is obvious, even if our course of action is not the same as yours.
… which pins down Penny’s distant location in terms of the universe of real politics.
I had another conversation yesterday with a lifetime Labour supporter (far more qualified than Penny to express a view). Need I elaborate on why things don’t look good without a serious re-think?
I do not believe the People of Peterborough are so Stupid that they will fall for the Disgusting tactics and Brainwashing Routine operated by Other Political Parties the MSM and MPs who are in The Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn but Not supportive of Jeremy or The Party. These MPs would rather see any other Political Party Win every Election including a General Election than have Jeremy And his Labour Policies for the People put into Practice. Tom Watson, Margaret Hodge, Jess Phillips, And all other New Labour Backstabbers of the Poor And Supporters of the SALE OF YOUR NHS if the English People Vote anyone other Than Labour into Power It will not only be the Ruination of your Country it will be the Dismantling of The Union of The Crowns and The End of The United Kingdom.
Oh for a return to the good old EU days of butter mountains & wine lakes…..subsidies for the French; subsidies for the Germans & eventual bankruptcy for the Greeks. British trade with the EU has declined rapidly as the system falls apart; what would have happened if we had joined the euro? Just another German colony.
Steve – wrong orifice!
(P.S. We didn’t join the euro)
Yes the Brexit Party Right Wing Barbarians are Neo-Liberals – they would privatise the NHS and believe in the marketisation of everything and outsourcing which means CHEAP LABOUR and zero hours plus job insecurity oh and Trump & Farage’s Trade Deals with chlorinated chicken!
Perhaps we should “Put ’em in a museum, and charge the people £1.50 just to see ’em!”
The Tories and Lib Dem Neo-Liberals co-authored austerity whilst giving tax cuts to millionaires and corporations (their Neo-Liberal pals) and eliminated NEED in council funding – stealing billions from Nothern Labour councils but gave £3.5b to southern Tory Councils so the likes of working people in Peterborough – austerity was and is only for YOU!
Labour is the only hope for diverse working people!
Lisa is a working class star, it will be tough in Posh but hopefully the working class there will sing for Lisa John Lennon’s cover: “Stand by me!”
We need a left wing democratic socialist World, led by diverse working people in every counrty where we sweep the Right Wing Barbarians and Grotesque Elite into the dustbin of history.
Diverse working people of the World unite!
X & Solidarity!