While all my friends are out protesting

[liv]

I sent the following email to Jeremy Corbyn, asking him to give his MPs a free vote on Article 50. I used email rather than a written letter because Corbyn's office make it clear that they do not accept letters (or phonecalls) from people who are not part of Corbyn's constituency.

Staffordshire, 30.1.17

Dear Mr Corbyn,

I am writing to urge you to allow your MPs a free vote on the expected Bill which will trigger Article 50.

I understand that you personally are not passionate about the European Union, and that you believe the referendum result to give a clear indication of the democratic will of the British people on the question of our membership. However, I am extremely concerned that Mrs May's Conservative government are using the referendum and the Brexit process as an excuse for a major power grab, and I feel that the Labour party should not lend support to this.

Mrs May has explicitly declared that she will cut wages in the UK in order to secure international trade deals, and it seems very likely that she aims to undermine workers' rights and sell the assets of the NHS for the same end. If this is allowed to continue unopposed, 2020 will be too late to restore workers' rights, human rights and the welfare state.

Even if I am wrong in that prediction, it is hard to see why anyone would choose to vote Labour in the next General Election, if Labour spend the intervening years supporting the Conservatives in enacting all their damaging policies completely unopposed. You will be aware how the electorate turned against the Liberal Democrats for supporting unpopular Conservative legislation, and the Liberal Democrats were in coalition so had a compelling reason to vote with the government.

As Leader of the Opposition, please permit your party's MPs to vote down Conservative initiatives that they believe to be misguided and against the interests of the British public. I am writing to you although not a constituent because I believe the upcoming vote on Article 50 is a matter of major national importance.

Thank you very much for all you do to protect the citizens of this country in a hostile political environment.

Yours Sincerely,
Dr [wallet name]
[work contact details]

Meanwhile my Dad is doing a really sterling letter-writing campaign about the horror show that is the Home Office mining NHS patient records in order to identify people they want to deport. (Never illegals, no human being is illegal.)

My gratitude goes out to everybody who's doing any kind of activism against all the scary political trends going on right now. I'm not contributing much myself, cos I'm mostly vacillating between terror and fatalistic despair. I'm hoping that getting started on doing something, however nominal, will help me to break out of that.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Have you seen the Irish response to Trump? It was commented in a Guardian article, and basically echoed May's. Australia is saying stuff like 'USA is finally catching up with us' and ...

I try not to despair but this is making me shiver.

[liv]

I'm... kind of triaging things to be scared of, right now, and foreign politicians sucking up to Trump is falling under the heading of despicable but not actively scary. I don't know. I feel as if my instincts for how to react when politicians do terrible things are completely miscalibrated. I mean, the terrible things going on are genuinely terrible, even lethal, like the defunding of the NHS and imposing of sanctions on people who literally can't survive without benefits. But then there's Trump, and, well, I could march in the street or write an angry letter or look at voting for someone better in the next election, and it doesn't seem on the right scale any more.

[angelofthenorth]

The shiver is due to the way governments seem not to be listening to their better selves and instead are reinforcing the bad decisions of other governments. It elbows out the little people.

As I said on my post, we need people in tory constituencies to sign the petitions, and campaign, more than anyone, because that's the only people that May et al will listen to. They know who the usual suspects are, and they know we can assemble a crowd at 24h notice.

I don't know what to do any more. I feel vulnerable because of the latency in decision making with ESA/HB and the fact that we have to appeal re: HB because of some rotten family and Council decisions. We've not been sanctioned yet we're still highly dependent on M for money because Gov have left us hanging out to dry.

The running down of the civil service is a major concern - they're killing off Llanelli Benefits Centre, which means that in an area of high unemployment the situation is just going to get worse.

It feels like we're heading for war, and Trump, May and Turnbull will be leading the forces of evil...

[davidgillon]

Good letter, I should do something similar.

I hadn't heard about the Home Office data-mining the NHS for immigration status, though I knew they, DWP and HMRC all want access for various reasons (DWP even made a bid for access to GP's records, not just hospital admissions data). And of course if one can do it, then it becomes much easier to share their results with the others. I'll have to try and bring myself back up to speed to see what's going on.

[liv]

It's not a completely new thing, they've had the theoretical right to ask for records for at least a few years, but it's really ramped up recently:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jan/24/nhs-hands-over-patient-records-to-home-office-for-immigration-crackdown

Guardian article, but most of the more rigorous reports are paywalled.

[davidgillon]

Thanks for the link. I missed most of last week's news thanks to the cold from hell (which I finally seem to have shaken).

[cosmolinguist]

The NHS is a newer front in the ongoing attempts to make everyone border guards: employers, landlords, schools...

liv, I'm so glad your dad is writing those letters. Thus is such an important thing.

[rmc28]

My kids' school asked me in the last *month* to provide my children's nationality. (I told them no, and they were fine with that. In an ideal world I'd have organised a parents campaign against it ... well, no, in an ideal world I wouldn't have to. But in a world where I had more energy, yes.)

[cosmolinguist]

No one can do all the campaigning. Bit there are other people on this one already; do you know about Schools ABC?

[rmc28]

I didn't, but thank you.

I think it must be people involved with that who made tweets which I saw in October? Anyway, I had seen something about schools and nationality information on twitter, but not followed it up, just taken note that I shouldn't provide it.

(and I meant really a parents-at-the-school campaign; we have a lot of children of academics, many of them from overseas)

[cosmolinguist]

Oh yes, a parents-at-the-school campaign would be great. But even if you just know this is something you can point people at, it reduces the energy required in reinventing the wheel.

You might have seen tweets from them; I know I was RTing them and a few parents I know found that helpful.

[aldabra]

I'm about to have to fill in that form with change of address details. I'm going to say "Citizen of the World". (But I chickened out of doing that on our new work takeover management HR form 8-( )

[liv]

Yeah, I was scared when I read about the schools asking for nationality, but somehow the Home Office not even asking, but just helping themselves to medical records has hit me emotionally. The only straw I'm clinging to is that they're at least making a token effort to behave legally, things like making claims that the data isn't "clinical" but only records of who joined a practice, and referring to exemptions in the HSCA, and dreadful though that Act may be, at least it's an actual law that has been through the normal process, not just an autocrat deciding to do whatever suits him. So it does seem like something that can be challenged in Parliament or in the courts, and that therefore my Dad's letters may help.

[siderea]

the Home Office mining NHS patient records in order to identify people they want to deport

Jesus fucking christ.

[liv]

It's not the worst thing, it's very far from the worst thing. There are credible accounts that our PM, when she was Home Secretary, was more or less directly implicated in paying security guards in immigration detention centres to rape refugees. It's just... with so much else going on, this falls right at the intersection of stuff that I personally find most terrifying, with evildoing that is on a small enough scale that there might just possibly be something I can do about it.

[ewt]

I didn't know about the NHS records thing, and neither did a bunch of people in my end of the Twittersphere, so thanks for that.

I am struggling to do more than signal-boosting at the moment.

[liv]

Ah, I'm glad you mentioned that. I often don't (re)Tweet these things because I assume everybody knows already. It's not as if I'm amazingly well informed, I just vaguely skim news and social media same as anyone else. And I do have a lot of sympathy for people who need to use Twitter and Facebook to keep in touch with their loved ones, and can't cope if their streams are a constant firehose of outrage and terror. But sometimes it is worth spreading the word, and thank you for reminding me of that.

[sfred]

Thank you to you and your Dad.

[liv]

He's good at writing letters of complaint, my Dad, and I'm really pleased that he's been turning that skill to pressing political issues.

[hairyears]

I had hoped that the NHS would resist that, but I've heard no mention of it if they did.

Successive Home Secretaries - not all of them Conservative - have put pressure on the Police to record the immigration status of everyone they interview. The Chief Constables had, until two years ago, refused to co-operate with that: their view had been that anyone can approach the Police and report a crime, without fear that they'll be asked a question that might lead to deportation.

Now potential witnesses no longer fear that an encounter with the police and the courts might lead to deportation: they know it will.

I do not doubt that we will now see adults and children left unregistered with a GP, and kept from hospital until their condition is perceived as even more dangerous than detention and deportation.

This will play out very badly indeed when multiple-resistant tuberculosis - or XDR-tuberculosis - comes visiting from the Indian subcontinent or Eastern European countries with unwelcome guests from Russia.

I fear that the authors of this policy look forward to the political gains that can be made, inflaming xenophobia with alarmist propaganda about foreigners in festering slums eagerly infecting our loved ones with deadly diseases.

I may, of course, be unduly cynical - frankly, uncharitable - in ascribing such a motive. But the best interpretation is that Mrs May, and who are collaborating in this, are worse than *very* stupid.

[liv]

The NHS as such is not well placed to fight the government, especially given the way it's been carved up since 2012. And honestly they're fighting for their existence right now. Letting patients get deported will lead to deaths, yes, but we'll probably never even get realistic figures on how many people are dying because hospitals are now so resource starved emergency and critical care are just not happening.

And there's the Junior Doctors' contract, and there's Brexit, and and and. Pretty much every week I hear stories like: a medical practice fighting for months to get the funding authorized to eg renew the lease on their premises, until they get desperate enough that all the doctors resign, at which point "emergency" funding can be released to transfer the practice to a private provider who then re-employs most of the original doctors (minus the ones who've given up in despair in the meantime).

But individual doctors and doctors' organizations are resisting, please don't think the NHS is just sitting there letting the government get away with this. Docs not cops is, exactly, resisting all these measures that are making foreigners afraid to seek healthcare. They're just not resisting as "the NHS".

[hairyears]

They're just not resisting as "The NHS"


That's reassuring, and more or less what I'd expect.

It does surprise me that senior managers didn't take a stand, though: deterrents to seeking medical advice increase the load on hospitals.