Abandon these 'reforms' now Mr Cameron!

Today we heard the news that the British Medical Association (BMA) has come out against the Tory party’s proposed reforms to the NHS. This weekend at their conference the Lib Dems voted against the government’s planned reforms. The Tory MP, and former GP, Sarah Wollaston stated that these reforms were a bad idea. So who exactly supports these changes? Not Unison, who believes these reforms to be unlawful. Nor the 11,000 NHS workers whose jobs will be at risk if these reforms go ahead. The question we must ask is why the government are still planning to go ahead with them.

Cameron argues that he is taking power away from ‘the managers’ and devolve it, and an £80bn budget, to GPs, or the term they prefer to use, ‘YOUR family doctor’. However, in reality GPs do not have time for to deal with the paperwork alongside their day to day duties. The GPs will hire managers from the private sector who will stand to make a huge profit out of these reforms. The privatisation of the NHS is already starting to seep in, despite the fact the Tories promised that there would be ‘no top down reorganisation of the NHS’.

We must as a labour movement ask what we can do to stop these reforms. We can support Unison’s legal challenge to these reforms. We can support the ‘Unite 4 the NHS’ campaign. We can take to the streets on 26th March and demand that these reforms are not passed. We can urge Lib Dem MPs to vote with their hearts, and the mainstream of their party, and join with Labour to defeat these reforms. Campaigners were successful in getting the Tories to drop their plans to privatise their forest. Surely we can galvanise the public against plans to privatise the NHS.

U-turn Mr Cameron, for the sake of the NHS. 

Rob Peaty

A few reflections on Lybia

Libya has slipped off the new agenda in the recent days, relegated behind the Japanese earthquake, the Liberal Democrat party conference and the prospect of Englands first 6 nations title since 2003. Naturally I’ve been salivating about the latter prospect but I’m also concerned that we’ll forget about the very real plight of the rebels in Libya will be forgotten now that the prospect of Ghaddafis imminent fall is gone. In the same that we abandoned democratic movements like the Green Revolution in Iran and nationalist movements like the Kurds in Iraq the West appears to be forgetting about the rebels who we’ve been egging on for some time in favor of the next sexy international crisis.

Of course there are still various diplomatic movements around Libya which will play out over the next few days around a no fly zone but we are letting the moment slip away. Already Ghaddafi is driving the rebels back town by town and as the issue becomes less urgent in the media it becomes less urgent for policymakers. As it becomes less urgent the incentives for inaction grow and thus we abandon those who we’ve promised to help leaving them only platitudes about our support. The voice against taking action grow-pointing to Iraq as an example of how we shouldn’t intervene in a nations internal affairs. Instead they suggest that we simply offer sanctions-which will take effect to be of any help-freeze assess and offer moral support. They object to us even arming the rebels-saying that it is an unacceptable breach of a nations sovereignty.

I’m a liberal internationalist and I’m proud of it. I supported the Iraq War. I also supported the actions we’ve taken in the past in Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia and so forth. I’m well aware that this is probably a minority position in the Labour party and one which is not popular since the invasion of Iraq generally. I can understand these objections-post-war Iraq was a disaster blighted by a lack of proper planning and American bigheadedness. The war itself was dreadfully managed and, without WMD’s or a UN resolution, apparently illegitimate. It is very tempting to simply close our eyes and refuse to get involved, citing the concept of national sovereignty or straight pacifism. In the first days of the Libyan crisis when it appeared that the rebels where sweeping all before it seemed that these arguments where effective, that the Libyan people would be able to oust the dictator themselves with a bit of asset freezing and pressure from international states.

However it now seems that a peoples uprising is ineffective when placed against a dictator who refuses to go, is not a victim of a palace coup and who is unafraid to use force. Gadaffi is winning the civil war in Libya. With superior firepower, a trained military and a lack of compunction about using force against protestors he’s regaining control of the country city by city while racking up a huge death toll. At worst, without intervention, he will have regained control of Libya within weeks. At best we may see a prolonged and increasingly brutal civil war on our doorstep with the resultant refugees, atrocities and death tolls. In either case its doubtful that a democracy will emerge and what example will that set to pro-democracy activists around the globe. When they do as we want, when they rise up (surprisingly successfully) against a dictator what do we do? We abandon them with a little light applause.

As a social democrat and an internationalist I find this unacceptable. Our beliefs are based around universal human worth, democracy, human rights and internationalism. We argue for equality of opportunity at home, for the right for people to elect their rulers and for greater accountability. Yet when we also see others struggling to free themselves from a dictatorship and then refuse to offer any concrete help for them when we have the ability to make their struggle easier. How can we justify that?

James Austin

Everywhere we go, people stop and ask us, who we are, and where we come from...

What do you write for the first post of a new blog? Do you outline the intent and purpose behind the blog, write a series of witty epithets about the essentially egocentric nature of blogging or simply dive straight into whatever subjects you hope to cover with the hope that you’ll emerge with a vaguely coherent? If your anything like me you’ll probably attempt all of these things and confuse the hell out of whoever reads the post, presuming (of course) that anyone does, and sound like a pretentious asshole in the process.

Anyway, welcome to the Nottingham University Labour Students (NULS) blog. The basic idea is to allow our members to post of whatever issues they fancy and to give a platform for discussion of major and minor issues. I’m sure that we will never able to compete with the truly informed and educated blogs but we’ll try...