hospitals

Morning Star: The Tories have wrecked the NHS – but that doesn’t mean Labour will rescue it

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-have-wrecked-nhs-doesnt-mean-labour-will-rescue-it

The NHS overtook the economy as voters’ biggest concern in February, according to polling by Ipsos. Small wonder when waiting lists have hit 7.5 million: there can hardly be a person in the country who doesn’t have a friend or relative who has been affected.

And the Conservatives bear a heavy responsibility.

In the decade up to the pandemic, real-terms healthcare spending per head rose on average by just 0.4 per cent a year — in four years it actually fell, despite rising pressures on the service.

That compares very poorly to the record of the last Labour government, which raised spending by 5.7 per cent a year on average from 1997-2010. It even compares badly to that of the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments, which averaged a 2.1 per cent annual increase.

But we should be more cautious than Poulter about endorsing Keir Starmer’s solution.

Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting have pointedly refused to offer the increases in NHS budgets that the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments delivered. Streeting is emphatic that he will not “pour money into a 20th-century model,” instead demanding reforms which, in increasing reliance on the private sector, both mimic existing Conservative policy and are unlikely to make a difference to waiting lists (because private healthcare in Britain recruits from the NHS, so overall capacity will not grow).

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Britain’s public services are collapsing under the strain of decades of neoliberal policy. In the NHS, hospitals have been undermined through outsourcing services to the private sector as well as by the cost of PFI debt — both issues with their origins in the Blair years.

To restore our NHS to health, we need a reversal of privatisation and outsourcing and a forced end to all PFI contracts, as well as a significant increase in overall funding to bring us closer to healthcare spending levels in France or Germany.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-have-wrecked-nhs-doesnt-mean-labour-will-rescue-it

Continue ReadingMorning Star: The Tories have wrecked the NHS – but that doesn’t mean Labour will rescue it

Elites in the global North are scared to talk about Palestine

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elites-global-north-are-scared-talk-about-palestine

FREE SPEECH NATION? Arrests are made as pro-Palestinian students and protesters are pushed off campus at the University of Texas, Wednesday April 24

While people across the world have been taking bold action in support of Palestine, the global North ruling class has used all tools at its disposal to support Israel’s genocide and criminalise solidarity writes VIJAY PRASHAD

ISRAELI BOMBS continue to fall on Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians with abandon. Al-Jazeera published a story about the destruction of 24 hospitals in Gaza, each of them bombed mercilessly by the Israeli military. Half of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel were children, their bodies littering the overwhelmed morgues and mosques of Gaza.

The former UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, Andrew Gilmour, told BBC Newsnight that the Palestinians are experiencing “collective punishment” and that what we are seeing in Gaza is “probably the highest kill rate of any military, killing anybody, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

Meanwhile, in the West Bank section of Palestine, Human Rights Watch shows that the Israeli military has participated in the displacement of Palestinians from 20 communities and has uprooted at least seven communities since October 2023. These are established facts.

Yet, these facts — according to a leaked memorandum — cannot be spoken about in the “newspaper of record” in the US, the New York Times. Journalists at the paper were asked to avoid the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory.”

Indeed, over the past six months, newspapers and television shows in the US have generally written about the genocidal violence using passive voice: bombs fell, people died.

Even on social media, where the terrain is often less controlled, the axe fell on key phrases; for instance, despite his professions of commitment to free speech, Elon Musk said that terms such as “decolonisation” and phrases such as “From the river to the sea” would be banned on X.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elites-global-north-are-scared-talk-about-palestine

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UN appeals for £2.2bn for Gaza to help Palestinians in desperate need of food and other aid

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/un-appeals-ps22bn-gaza-help-palestinians-desperate-need-food-and-other-aid

THE United Nations has appealed for $2.8 billion (£2.2bn) to provide desperately needed aid to three million Palestinians, stressing that tackling looming famine in the devastated Gaza Strip requires not only food but sanitation, water and health facilities.

Andrea De Domenico, the head of the UN humanitarian office for Gaza and the West Bank, told reporters on Tuesday night that massive operations are required to restore those services and meet minimum standards — and this can’t be done during military operations.

He pointed to the destruction of hospitals, water and sanitation facilities, homes, roads and schools by Israeli forces, adding that “there is not a single university that is standing in Gaza.”

Mr De Domenico said Israel’s recently ended so-called military operation at Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, was so destructive the facility has been forced to shut down.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/un-appeals-ps22bn-gaza-help-palestinians-desperate-need-food-and-other-aid

Continue ReadingUN appeals for £2.2bn for Gaza to help Palestinians in desperate need of food and other aid

Killing humanitarian workers as a strategy: Israel’s endgame in Gaza

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/killing-humanitarian-workers-strategy-israels-endgame-gaza

TARGETING AID: World Central Kitchen vehicle hit in an Israeli airstrike in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, on Tuesday, April 2 2024

RAMZY BAROUD explains that Israel isn’t making mistakes, even due to callous carelessness — killing aid workers is part of a wider plan to make life in northern Gaza impossible, to facilitate ethnic cleansing

ISRAEL described its clearly deliberate killing of seven humanitarian aid workers on April 1 as a “grave mistake,” a “tragic event” that “happens in war.”

Israel is, obviously, lying. This entire so-called war — actually genocide — in Gaza has been based on a series of lies, some of which Israel continues to peddle.

For some, in the mainstream media, it took months to accept the obvious fact that Israel has been lying about the events that led to the war and the military objectives of its constant targeting of hospitals, schools, shelters and other civilian facilities.

So, it was only logical for Israel to lie about killing the six internationals, and their Palestinian driver, of the World Central Kitchen (WCK). Notwithstanding an event as atrocious as this, it is implausible for Israel to start telling the truth now.

Luckily, few seem to believe Israel’s version regarding WCK, or its continued massacres elsewhere in Gaza. Israel “cannot credibly investigate its own failure in Gaza,” the US-based NGO said in a statement on April 5.

The issue of targeting these internationals, however, has to be placed within a larger context.

Israel was hardly secretive about its intention to deny Palestinians even the most basic necessities of survival in Gaza, epitomised in the words of Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant on October 9: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”

Initially, this statement, and many others, were understood at the time to be an outcome of Israel’s desire to punish Palestinians for the October 7 al-Aqsa Flood operation, by resorting to its typical tactic of collective punishment.

With time, however, and based on statements made by other Israeli officials, it became clear that Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Palestinians altogether.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/killing-humanitarian-workers-strategy-israels-endgame-gaza

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US Abstains as UN Security Council Demands ‘Immediate Cease-Fire’ in Gaza

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield raises her hand to abstain during a U.N. Security Council vote on a Gaza cease-fire resolution on March 25, 2024 in New York City.  (Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“This resolution must be implemented,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. “Failure would be unforgivable.”

The U.S. on Monday declined to veto but still abstained from a United Nations Security Council on Monday to adopt a resolution demanding an “immediate cease-fire for the month of Ramadan” in the embattled Gaza Strip, a move that came amid an ongoing Israeli genocide in which more than 114,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded and hundreds of thousands of others are starving.

The Security Council voted 14-0, with the U.S. abstaining, to approve a resolution for the cessation of hostilities during the Muslim holy month after member states overcame a sticking point over the removal of the word “permanent” from an earlier draft version. Instead, the resolution calls for an “immediate” cease-fire.

The U.S. had vetoed three of the previous four cease-fire resolutions.

“This resolution must be implemented,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said following Monday’s vote. “Failure would be unforgivable.”

As the U.N. News explained:

The resolution is a bare-bones call for a cease-fire during the month of Ramadan, which began on March 11. It also demands the return of about 130 hostages seized in Israel and held in Gaza and emphasizes the urgent need to allow ample lifesaving aid to reach a starving population in the besieged enclave.

The demand to end hostilities has so far eluded the council following the Israeli forces’ invasion of Gaza in October after Hamas attacks left almost 1,200 dead and 240 taken hostage.

Since then, Israel’s daily bombardment alongside its near-total blockade of water, electricity, and lifesaving aid has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the health ministry there, where a recent U.N.-backed report showed an imminent famine unfolding.

Palestinians—especially children—are starving to death in Gaza. Hospitals are under attack, with Israeli forces reportedly executing large numbers of people inside al-Shifa Hospital.

Meanwhile, the approximately 1.5 milllion Palestinians in the southern city of Rafah—most of them refugees forcibly displaced from other parts of Gaza—are bracing for an anticipated ground invasion, which Israeli leaders say will proceed despite a warning from U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris that such an operation would have “consequences.”

Monday’s vote followed intense negotiations over the measure introduced by 10 non-permanent Security Council members—Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, South Korea, and Switzerland.

The United States—which, despite growing frustration over genocidal atrocities, still arms Israel—brushed off a threat from far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel a planned visit to Washigton by a high-level Israeli delegation if the U.S. did not veto the resolution.

The Associated Press reported Netanyahu followed through with his threat and canceled the trip.

Human rights defenders welcomed Monday’s vote.

“Israel needs to immediately respond to the U.N. Security Council resolution adopted today by facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid, ending its starvation of Gaza’s population, and halting unlawful attacks,” Louis Charbonneau, director of Human Rights Watch’s U.N. program, said in a statement.

“Palestinian armed groups should immediately release all civilians held hostage,” he added. “The U.S. and other countries should use their leverage to end atrocities by suspending arms transfers to Israel.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingUS Abstains as UN Security Council Demands ‘Immediate Cease-Fire’ in Gaza