THIS government's announcement that it is negotiating with private health providers to treat NHS patients doesn't just highlight the crisis in the NHS. It is a grotesque illustration of what the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) means to the NHS.
Wrong strategy to take on PFI Health Secretary Alan Milburn's announcement that private company BUPA is to be given a key role in the NHS has shocked many health workers. It was also cynically timed to overshadow the TUC's Positively Public rally against privatisation in central London on the same day.
I am Somali woman living and working in London who decided to join Health Workers Against the War. I took that decision after my seven year old daughter came home from school and said it is not right that poor children should be bombed in Afghanistan. If only Bush and Blair had the same morality as a child!
Here in Ipswich in Suffolk we're campaigning in the first by-election since the general election in June. I'm standing again for the Socialist Alliance. In the general election the main plank of our campaign was opposing privatisation. Now it is opposing Bush and Blair's war.
THE ONCE-pacifist German Green Party held a conference two weeks ago where the leadership announced its support for Bush's war against Afghanistan. Green Party leader and foreign minister Joschka Fischer's speech echoed the war hysteria and propaganda of Bush, Blair, and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democratic Party.
EDUCATION secretary Estelle Morris announced last week that the government is going to change the arrangements for university fees and grants. There will, at a minimum, be grants for some students, and possibly all fees will go, to be replaced by a graduate tax.
AS A lawyer specialising in human rights, civil liberties and asylum, I am extremely concerned about the climate of intolerance, fear and racism which surrounds our government's declaration of a "war on terrorism." We cannot claim to be fighting for democracy and human rights if we start off by abrogating basic freedoms and perpetrating injustice. Proposals to bring in even more draconian terrorist laws and laws against asylum seekers will carry with them expectations that this will somehow result in the identification of terrorist suspects.
