Posts Tagged ‘subsidies’

NHS, Shaker, Drax, Gurkhas, Herbalists & Bikes

Monday, April 24th, 2023

Wednesday 24th April 2013 was a busy day for protests in Westminster. And there was one in the City.


Protest the Privatisation of NHS – Old Palace Yard

NHS, Shaker, Drax, Gurkhas, Herbalists & Bikes

The House of Lords was debating NHS regulations which imposed full competitive tendering on the NHS, a key part in the escalating backdoor privatisation of the NHS.

Unite had set up a ‘Wheel of Fortune’ game show hosted by people wearing ‘David Cameron’ and ‘Jeremy Hunt’ masks and listing the likely costs of various procedures due to the tendering system. They feared “that the coalition’s NHS policies, including a multi billion pound funding squeeze coupled with a massive reorganisation, will destroy the 65 year old health service, paving the way for a new marketised system where paying up to £10,000 for maternity costs or £13,450 for a new hip is the norm.”

NHS, Shaker, Drax, Gurkhas, Herbalists & Bikes

Unite said that already more than £20 billion of health costs go to private companies, who take their decisions on the basis of profit rather than the interests of patients. The Lords were debating a motion for the annulment of the regulations on the grounds that Parliament had been assured “that NHS commissioners would be free to commission services in the way they consider in the best interests of NHS patients“.

Protest the Privatisation of NHS


Bring Shaker Aamer Home – Parliament Square

NHS, Shaker, Drax, Gurkhas, Herbalists & Bikes

Following a petition with 117,387 signatures to bring Shaker Aamer home from Guantanamo, a debate had been held that morning by MPs in Westminster Hall, where most of the 17 MPs who spoke called for his release, including Shaker’s own MP, the Conservative MP for Battersea, Jane Ellison, who also came out to speak with the protesters.

NHS, Shaker, Drax, Gurkhas, Herbalists & Bikes

Unfortunately such debates, although they do increase pressure on the government to take action have no actual consequences. But perhaps it did help to persuade the government that it had to ignore the embarrassment of British agents at being complicit in his torture by the US and make clear to the US government he should at last be released after being held for 12 years, long after he had been cleared of any involvement in terrorism. As I noted, “The facts about torture are now largely public and totally indefensible and it is time for justice to be done.”

Bring Shaker Aamer Home


Drax Biomass Threat to our Planet – Princes St, CityDrax AGM, wpp

Green Party leader Natalie Bennett speaking at the protest

I had to take the tube to the City to attend a protest outside Gocer’s Hall where the AGM of Drax, the huge coal-burning power station near Selby in Yorkshire was being held. Drax was planning to convert half its capacity to bio-mass and become the largest biomass-burning power station in the world, using 1.5 times the total UK wood production per year.

The wood pellets would come mainly from devastating clear-cutting of highly diverse forests in North America, and although re-grown will eventually remove the same amount of carbon this will take a hundred years or more – during which time the carbon Drax emits – roughly 50% greater than burning coal – will be contributing to disastrous global warming.

Drax already has a disastrous impact in South America were land is being grabbed from traditional communities for open cast coal mining, usually with complete disregard for their human and civil rights, cleared of its biodiverse forests and diverted from food production – often in places where food is desperately needed. Conversion to wood-burning at Drax will result in even more environmental and social destruction.

The incentive to change to wood-burning is that under current government policies Drax will receive huge government subsidies from funds intended to promote renewable energy, diverting funds from schemes for energy production and conservation that actually will help to combat climate change.

Drax Biomass Threat to our Planet


Gurkhas Call for equal treatment – Old Palace Yard

I returned to Westminster, where Several hundred Gurkha pensioners and supporters were holding a rally on the 198th anniversary of the first recruitment of Gurkhas into the British Army to deliver a petition to David Cameron asking for equal treatment to other British Army ex-soldiers.

British Army Gurkhas who retired before 1997 were granted the right to settle in the UK in 2009, but their pension remains only a fifth of that of other British soldiers, and is impossible to live on in the UK, being based on the cost of living in Nepal.

Gurkhas Call for equal treatment


UK herbalists Want Regulations – Old Palace Yard

Also in Old Palace Yard were UK herbalists, both traditional and Chinese, protesting against the failure of the government to bring in the statutory regulations they had promised to do by 2012.

Under EU regulations from 2004, traditional remedies then in use could continue to be provided until 2011, but after that had to be covered by national policies to regulate their safety and effectiveness. Although the government had promised to set this up, it has so far failed to do so, and they are now unable to prescribe many commonly used and effective common herbal remedies.

UK herbalists Want Regulations


Get Britain Cycling Report Launch – Parliament Square

Finally, in Parliament Square, Christ Boardman, a gold medal cylist in the Barcelona Olympics posed with MPs from the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group to launch their report ‘Get Britain Cycling.’

This calls for more to be spent on supporting cycling and that it should be considered in all planning decisions. They want more segregated cycle lanes and for the 30mp urban speed limit to by reduced to 20mph. Children should be taught to ride a bike at school and the government should produce and annually report on a cross-departmental Cycling Action Plan. Cycling has enormous advantages both individually and for us all in better health and reducing pollution with reduced health spending.

Get Britain Cycling Report Launch


Renationalise UK Railways

Sunday, January 1st, 2023

Anniversaries are strange things, and some get celebrated while others are ignored. I don’t think there was a great deal of mention that a couple of days ago was the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the USSR, whose existence dominated much of world history for the following sixty-eight years – and without which, for all its faults, Hitler would have won the Second World War and I would have grown up in a fascist state. Thought at the moment the UK seems well on the way to becoming one under the whole raft of bills our government is in process of enacting.

Renationalise UK Railways
2011

But today, in the middle of strikes by various unions against the government refusal to allow employers to engage meaningfully in negotiation with workers in the public sector and heavily tax-payer supported sectors, particularly the privatised railways, its perhaps appropriate to recall that this is the 100th anniversary of a truly significant date for our railway system, the 1923 regrouping of our railways into the ‘Big Four’ of the LNER, GWR, SR, and LMSR.

Renationalise UK Railways
2011

The Railways Act 1921 which led to the regrouping was enacted to stem the losses that the railways – around 120 separate companies – were suffering from and to provide the kind of integrated service that had benefited the country when the railways had been run by government during and after the 1914-8 war until 1921.

Renationalise UK Railways
Dartford Bridge and Channel Tunnel Rail link, West Thurrock, Essex

The government then resisted calls for full nationalisation but integrated the rail services on a regional basis. They had also wanted to bring in more worker participation in the running of the railways, but this was opposed by the rail companies and was dropped.

2005

Not all the railways in the UK were included but it did lead to integrated services on the great majority of lines, with the advantages in running the system that this provided. A significant omission were some of the commuter lines around London which were in 1933 amalgamated together with buses and trams into the London Passenger Transport Board.

The rail system was further integrated by the 1947 act which nationalised the ‘Big Four’. Depression in the 1930s had essentially bankrupted them, but the extra traffic in the war and shortly after had just kept them alive. British Railways essentially retained the regional territories of the four companies though setting up a separate Scottish region and dividing the old LNER territory into two for some years.

British Railways (it became British Rail in 1965) had ambitious plans for modernisation in 1955, which included electrification of some major lines and the replacement of steam by diesel locomotives. The plan was severely cut by government and parts were rushed and poorly implemented, with the forecast cuts in costs being largely a pipe-dream.

The railways were stopped by government from making much of the investment needed, and instead reports in 1963 and 1965 led to a severe pruning of the network. Dr Beeching is widely seen as having been influenced by the car industry who wanted to promote the use of their vehicles rather than rail travel. In recent years some of those closed lines have been reopened but unfortunately many key locations have been allowed to be built over.

A 1968 act created a number of passenger transport executives in large urban areas, which took over the management of local lines and prevented some even more extreme closures. And in 1982 British Rail was re-organised into sectors – ‘Inter-City’, and what later became called Network South-East and Regional Railways and several freight groups. In the main sectors there were separate sub-sectors and it isn’t clear to me whether there was any real advance in services from this splitting of responsibilities, though it did mean a rash of different coloured trains.

But sectorisation was perhaps just a preparation for privatisation, which took place in 1994-7. Although the number of passengers using the railways has increased since then, so too have the subsidies, largely being passed on as dividends to the foreign state-owned companies who are now paid to run our rail services. As British taxpayers we are now subsidising French, Italian, German and Dutch railways.

Now there is increasing public demand for our rail services to be re-nationalised – with opinion polls showing a a huge majority of the public backing public ownership, even in the ‘red-wall’ parliamentary seats the Tories won in the last General Election. According to fact checkers Full Fact, “64% of the 1,500 adults polled in June 2018 said they would support renationalising the railways. 19% said they would oppose it, and 17% said they didn’t know.” The latest YouGov poll in November 2022 showed slightly greater support with now only 11% opposed and 23% of ‘Don’t Knows’.

I’ve never been a railway photographer and had to search hard to find any pictures to go with this post. The lower two are from the West Drayton to Staines line closed in the 1960s.


Rail Fares, ISIS and Biofuels – 28 Oct 2014

Friday, October 28th, 2022

Fair Fares Petition – Westminster. Tue 28 Oct 2014

Eight years later problems with our rail system continue and no significant changes have been made. Rail is a textbook example of something which should be run as in integrated public service and privatisation has been an entirely predictable disaster, at least for taxpayers and particularly those who use the railways.

Campaigners met at the Dept of Transport in Horseferry Rd

It has of course been a bonanza for the companies that have run parts of the service, particularly the three large companies that own and hire out most of the rail carriages, engines and waggons. Three ROSCOs (Rolling stock leasing companies) – Porterbrook, Eversholt and Willow – own together 87% of the rolling stock – and have made huge profits for their shareholders while failing to invest a great deal in new rolling stock. They are almost entirely owned by German, Australian, Canadian and other multinationals, mostly registered in Luxembourg to evade tax.

Stephen Joseph OBE, executive director of the Campaign for Better Transport joins the protest

Probably most people now know that the companies that actually run the trains – Train Operating Companies or TOCs – are largely foreign owned, mostly by the nationalised railways of Germany, France and Holland, with a couple from Italy and one from China (Hong Kong.) We do now have three nationalised TOCs, ScotRail, Northern and Transport for Wales. So basically the railways proved a mechanism for our government to hand over large amount of our taxes to these foreign countries.

They stop to pose in Parliament Square

The Campaign for Better Transport protest on Tuesday 28th October 2014 was more simply about changes in the evening peak time fares introduced by Northern Rail, then I think run by Serco-Abellio, a subsidiary of the Dutch state railway. These changes have particularly hit shift and part-time workers who work irregular hours, resulting in a 167% increase for some. Other TOCs have since made similar changes – with the ‘Off-Peak’ fares no longer available on my line, having been replaced by much more restricted evening fares.

And then hand the petition to Rail Minister Claire Perry MP

Our whole incredibly complex fare system is also down to the fragmented privatisation, and often means people pay far more than necessary. Even the highly trained ticket office staff are often unable to find the cheapest fare, and machines and web services are often misleading.

Rail fares are now often ridiculously high, particularly for those unable to book in advance. It’s often cheaper to fly to America than take a train from one English city to another. Even the Advance fares (Introduced by British Rail before privatisation) limited to a specific train can be pretty huge, often several times the European fares for similar journey lengths. We need lower fares to encourage people to stop using cars and move to public transport.

More at Fair Fares Petition.


Kobane – Unite against Isis Drawing – Trafalgar Square, Tue 28 Oct 2014

Kurds chanted slogans against ISIS and in support of the defenders of Kobane around a giant pavement chalk drawing based on an agonised Statue of Liberty in front of London’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

More pictures at Kobane – Unite against Isis Drawing.


Biofuel picket Green Investment Bank Birthday – King Edward Street, Tue 28 Oct 2014

Protesters from Biofuelwatch and London Biomassive, some dressed as wise owls, picketed the second birthday celebrations of the Green Investment Bank at Bank of America Merrill Lynch against their funding of environmentally disastrous biomass and incineration projects.

The say the large-scale projects the bank funds are worse for the environment and for climate change than burning coal and urged the GIB to finance “low carbon sustainable solutions” instead of these “high-carbon destructive delusions.”

More at Biofuel picket Green Investment Bank Birthday.