Labour & Maternity- dreadful pun, dreadful record

[frank ward]

Labour and Maternity ? – a dreadful pun, a dreadful record.

I’d like to vent my spleen on the Labour Party, especially their behaviour during the current maternity crisis.

Locally, as far as I am aware the Caithness Labour Party has not uttered a single word in defence of Caithness Maternity Unit. Ex-Labour councillor John Rosie, Maureen Macmillans ‘representative’ at recent workshops discussing the ‘options’ for Wick, was actually so bad that NAG felt obliged to write a letter of complaint to her about him. Of course she took no action.

Maureen Macmillan (Labour MSP) claims she has ‘lobbied strongly’ for the Caithness Unit but, when asked, she REFUSED to release her correspondence (if any) to the NHS Board or Calder Committee.

I can reveal that the inept Health minister, Malcolm Chisholm has now said that he has in fact NEVER received correspondence on this matter from the fragrant Ms Macmillan (as of June 10th 2004).

When a NAG delegation met Health Minister Chisholm in Inverness, MacMillan and Dierdre Stevens sat silently alongside him. Their only contribution to the meeting was to jointly and flatly contradict an important and factually-correct NAG point that the EGAMS remit was to stay within existing resources (ie no extra money).

There were no Labour Party placards on ANY of the demonstations in Wick or elsewhere else, a reflection of both their political bankruptcy and also of the fact that they have few ‘activists’ left. (It is widely believed that the only people now working for the ever-shrinking Labour Party are trade union officials, councillors, and their close friends and relatives).

The bare-faced cheek of Maureen Macmillan MSP is incredible. Remember her strutting the platform at the huge Rally in Wick on Mothers Day? Remember the applause she milked as she promised her full support for the campaign?
All the while this woman is stabbing us in the back, acquiescent and silent as the Board’s downgrading scheme lumbers on.
As far as I am aware, not a single person within the Labour Party has ever stated that they support the retention of full consultant services at Wick.

It’s not just her, of course, she’s only the organ grinder’s monkey. Nationally the Labour Party is pressing through centralisation of acute services with dogmatic determination, AND with the full agreement of their LibDem partners.

When NAG lobbied MSPs at Edinburgh on June 17th, not a single Labour MSP (the largest group) bothered to attend the briefing, though the room was only 100 yards from the building.

So, if the people of Caithness think the Labour Party is supporting them, they are quite mistaken. This miserable little gang of careerists and opportunists deserve to be booted out at the next opportunity and, if there are any socialists still remaining within the Labour Party, they should join the SSP. You won’t shift a wheelbarrow by sitting inside it.

Trade unionists should follow the Railworkers and Firefighters in dumping Labour. Why do Amicus members still tolerate their union giving Labour £1 million per year?

I write these lines in the hope that the guilty will be prompted into reversing their position and start to behave properly. Can they remember, I wonder, why they joined Labour in the first place?

[frank ward]

Latest antics by the Labour Party feature our friend Maureen Macmillan, Labour list MSP for the Highlands & Islands........

She initially indicated her willingness to be part of a parliamentary cross-party group on loss of consultant services.

Cross-Party Groups have some parliamentary kudos and a certain influence. Their recommendations have some weight. They must be registered and contain a certain mixture of MSPs to be recognised. Over recent months various MSPs have been gathering support for such a group.

Then the fragrant Maureen decided (or was told) to pull the plug.

JUST ONE HOUR before the group was to be officially registered, she suddenly withdrew her support. There was no time to get a replacement.

The application was rejected because of this technicality. This ensured that it will be several months before the group can re-apply, and thus several months before it may make any official submissions.

This time loss will cover much of the 'consultation' period granted by the Health Board regarding changes to the maternity & gynaecology services in Caithness..

Thus our Labour MSP has once again stabbed us in the back.
..........

By their deeds shall ye know them.

[frank ward]

Yesterday's Highland Health Board meeting was attended by various observers.

The NAG Banner saw the unusual gathering of the Scottish Socialists with the Tories, the SNP and Jamie Stone.

Who WASN'T there? No prizes for guessing - NOBODY from the Labour Party.
The deafening silence continues.

[frank ward]

WELL WELL WELL !

OK so its taken TEN MONTHS for one to speak, but at last there are signs of life.

And only two weeks after I started this thread - Such is the power of the media!

Finally the heroic defenders of the working class are speaking out!

Labour councillor Roger Saxon was heard, I believe, on Caithness FM.

He's also been mentioned in the P&J (Aug 18th):

'Thurso councillor Roger Saxon said people in the area want round the clock consultant cover at Wick even if the service fell short of what experts viewed as the best possible model of care.'

Thank you for that Roger now let's see you making some waves in your Labour Party and get them to stop the downgrading.

[frank ward]

The Herald's feature earlier this week and subsequent articles have named several Labour MSPs who have finally come out of hiding and spoken publicly on behalf of their local hospitals.

Of course this is an act of self preservation as the enormity of the Executive's crimes dawns on them.

But you've got to hand it to our own Highland Labour List MSPs. They have remained loyal and tight-lipped.
No public defence of services at the Belford in Lochaber or of Maternity services in Caithness.

NOT A WORD OF SUPPORT FROM ANY OF THEM

(consistent for the past 11 months)

[JAWS]

All List MSP's of all parties are simply Party Appointees.

If the Party gets enough votes then they get elected automatically, if they get placed at the bottom of the list then their chance of election disappears.

Guess where the List MSPs who upset any of the Parties will end up on the List!

The Parties put the List MSPs in Parliament, so the Voters do not matter!

[frank ward]

This week's Caithness Courier carries a half-page report (page 3) on 'Labour dissent on maternity issue. I commend it to you all to read.
I will respond to the nonsense peddled by Roger Saxon in de course.
F Ward
...........

[frank ward]

For the benefit of thoose unable to see a copy of this week's Caithness Courier, I give below the unedited text of my letter to the newspaper.

Dear Editor,

THE SHAME OF LABOUR

How refreshing it was to read the article in last week’s Courier about ‘Labour dissent on maternity issue.’

The article described the lone efforts of Thurso Councillor Roger Saxon to justify his party’s stance on the maternity issue before an unconvinced group of trades unionists.

Could this sudden concern within the Labour ranks have been related I wonder to several hundred SSP leaflets distributed in Wick and Thurso a few days before the Trades Council meeting? This leaflet lambasted the local Labour Party for its ten-month silence, and listed the nefarious activities of the Labour MSP Maureen MacMillan during the maternity crisis.

I am glad to see these issues being raised at last by Labour Party members. But the hapless Councillor Roger Saxon, under fire from his own rank and file, then launched into a personal attack on me, when I was not present to defend myself.
He claims that when I went to see health minister Malcolm Chisholm earlier this year, I ‘tried to make a circus out of it.’

This is a malicious misrepresentation. The meeting was a normal, orderly affair with NAG trying to impress local concerns on the Minister. Roger Saxon never spoke at all as far as I can recall.
I was there as a member of the official NAG delegation, not as a representative of the SSP.
With other NAG members having covered most points eloquently, I spoke only once, to briefly explain to the Minister that the national EGAMS report which had supposedly studied the best maternity options was obliged from the start to keep its recommendations within existing financial constraints.

I was promptly contradicted by Dierdre Steven and Maureen Macmillan who both emphatically denied that this was the case, that what I said was “just not true” – their only contribution to the meeting. I did not have the documentation to illustrate this, so I did not press my point.

There was no ‘circus’, Roger, simply a quiet group making its points to the nodding Minister. You were present so you know the truth.

When I get home and dig up the EGAMS Report, lo and behold its very first paragraph reads:
“The Group is tasked to produce a model specification for the provision of acute maternity services within the context of A Framework for Maternity Services in Scotland, and ESSENTIALLY WITHIN EXISTING REASOURCES"

Readers may recall that this was during a period (2001) when stated national Labour policy was to continue the fiscal policies of the Tory Party (ie cuts).

Roger Saxon then complains that the SSP ‘identified itself’ with the NAG campaign. Yes, he is perfectly correct, the SSP does identify itself with the aims of the NAG campaign (which is more than can be said of the Labour Party). And why not? We agree fully with the retention of full consultant cover.
Right from the start the SSP issued thousands of leaflets in Caithness, building support for the public meetings organised by the Friends and for the big demonstrations at Wick airport and at the Hospital itself. We collected over £150 at streetstalls to get an action group launched. Labour collected not a penny.
Roger also appears to have forgotten that the Mothers Day March was initially called by the SSP and hundreds of SSP leaflets and posters were issued to build for it. The Caithness Labour Party remained silent, as it has done ever since.

The SNP, Tories, and the Liberal Democrat MSPs also support NAG. Sometimes these MSPs show up for a photoshoot with NAG and nobody, including me, complains when they do. When SSP members carry SSP banners on marches and demonstrations, this too is a visible sign of support, and the absence of placards of the other parties is hardly the fault of the SSP.

But Roger is correct in his remarks about the Tories. While some may welcome the support of the MSP Mary Scanlon, as well as all others who give verbal support, I agree with Roger that the Tories are no friends of the NHS and they would be no better than Labour if elected.

Both myself and the Scottish Socialist Party are proud of our active and consistent defence of the Health Service all over Scotland. The scandal is that we should have to do so under a Labour Government. We will continue to expose and oppose the needless centralisation of rural medicine.

Labour’s bland and meaningless remarks such as wanting ‘the best possible care’ for patients are simply not good enough. The current level of cover is the best, the safest, and probably the cheapest of all the options up for consultation.
Outright support for the retention and funding of full consultant cover at Caithness is the litmus test, a test which Roger – and his party - has clearly failed.

Yours sincerely

Frank Ward
Secretary
Caithness & Sutherland SSP

PS
Roger Saxon also takes a sideswipe at the Anti-War marchers who were outside the same Labour Conference. I was not able to participate in that march, much as I wanted to. But I find it ironic that his professed sympathy for ‘terminally-ill’ people in the nearby Hospice does not extend to the thousands of Iraqis and coalition servicemen who are now most certainly terminally dead, with more to follow, in an illegal war and occupation led by his own rotten Party.



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