Members, family and friends outside LAS HQ.
It has been a very busy couple of weeks for the branch and our members. We had a great turnout for the demonstration on the 26th March. Over 60 members, family and friends joined us outside the London Ambulance Service Headquarters in Waterloo Road before heading off to be swallowed up in the main demonstration of over 500,000.
UNISON headed the march and was by far the biggest presence. That demonstration against the Coalition’s vicious, unnecessary cuts to the public sector and welfare system is the start, and not the end, of our campaign.
Thanks to everyone who came and showed real solidarity. I hope you all felt, like I did on the day, that we are not alone.
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The cuts in vital funding are not happening within a void, to other people, in other places, outside and away from the ambulance community.
They are happening to us! Now!
Funding for our Service has been cut in real terms. The London Ambulance Service, after year on year increases (helped by UNISON and our members) has for the first time in a decade, been left high, dry and wanting.
This is a bad time for our Service, our staff and our patients.
These cuts put our Service at risk. These cuts put our staff at risk. These cuts puts patients at risk.
We will campaign against them and denounce them at every opportunity.
We were assured that the NHS would be ‘ringfenced’. Lie number one.
We were assured that ‘frontline’ jobs would be safe. Lie number two.
I attended the London Ambulance Trust Board meeting last week to make clear our opposition to these funding cutbacks which will take our Service backwards.
The cuts are not a modernising strategy:they are a debilitating, destructive plan to soften us up for the entry of the private sector.
The cuts have nothing to do with better patient care: they have everything to do with the uncaring coldness towards the health of working people by the millionaires within the Coalition who can see the opportunities for a fast buck for their friends.
UNISON is very clear that this is not the fault of the Trust Board, or the Directors, or the Senior Management Team, or the Chief Executive (although the decisions regarding how to manage these cuts are their responsibility).
The Chancellor of the Exchequer with the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), and the Secretary of State for Health with the NHS White Paper, supported by the Coalition,right wing press and neo-liberal politics are the architects of this attack upon health.
No blame towards the Service, in fact it is vital that we work together to get through this difficult period, but, that notwithstanding, we feel disappointment that as of yet, not one senior person on the management side has stood with us, in public, to denounce what is happening as morally wrong. There is still time of course.
We stood together to get the year on year increases of funding that helped get our Service to where it is. We stood together to get increases in staffing levels which brought lots of new people into the Service: staff and managers.
We should also stand together in defence of these things.
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UNISON Health Conference has just finished in Liverpool this week. As you would expect it was dominated by the cuts and pension debate.
The conference ended united and determined to protect our National Health Service and hard fought for pensions.
Speaker after speaker, myself included, rose to the challenge facing us. Liverpool is a great city that has been at the forefront of defending public health for more than a hundred years.
Liverpool was the first place in the UK to see the need for, and appoint a ‘Medical Officer of Health’.
That was Dr William Henry Duncan in 1847. He was born in Liverpool, not far from the Conference Centre. There is a pub named after him – Doctor Duncan’s. He also became Britain’s first Chief Medical Officer.
In a hundred and sixty years from now I would willingly bet that there will not be a pub named The Andrew Lansley.
Of course William Duncan was battling health in a different world. In those days Liverpool was one of the biggest and busiest ports on the globe. Not only was hundreds of ships bringing in goods from all over the world, twenty-four hours a day, they were also bringing in diseases from all over the world, some known, many not.
Couple that against a backdrop of abstract poverty, malnutrition and non existant sanitation within the city and you have a problem, to say the least.
We still have a problem with public health in 2011 at a time when Britain is the fourth richest country in the world.
We should be putting more funding in, not reducing it. Come back Dr Duncan.
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 If you are reading this, work for the London Ambulance Service or are eligible to join, and are not yet a member of UNISON Join Today!
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Eric Roberts
Branch Secretary
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