Liverpool city council condemns cuts programme
Liverpool City Council has just adopted the following resolution over the closure of the Liverpool Blood Centre:-
"That this Council deplores the proposal to drastically reduce the
number of regional blood centres from 12 to 3 so called super centres
to serve the entire country. Council also deplores the inadequate
"consultation" which has taken place over this ill advised and
damaging proposal. Council condemns the potential significant loss of
skilled jobs and reduction in workforce size which will result if this
proceeds unchanged. Council also notes that this will severely stretch
the current close working relationships between the regional centres
and local hospitals.
Council recalls that the previous rationalisation of the National
Blood Service by the Tory Government in the 1990s was opposed by all
members on the City Council and calls for all party support against
this risky and unproven Labour Government proposal which is driven
purely by the desire to cut costs, possibly as a prelude to potential
privatisation of this profitable service. Council also requests all
Merseyside MPs to strenuously oppose this stupid plan."
[The agenda for the Liverpool City Council meeting is online here]
posted by NBS SOS @ 05:10
2 Comments
2 Comments:
You are of course right to fight what is yet another inept proposal from the present administration.
Sadly - this represents just another small step on the road to to the free market neo-liberal utopia - towards which successive administrations have been dragging the UK since the final days of the Callaghan Government.
As a nation we do not have to simply'put up' with this.
Government in a Liberal democracy such as ours depends for its ability to act upon the legitimacy it can claim as provided by the electoral process. The fact that Labour or Conservative (or for that matter - Lib Dem) is in reality simply a label; beneath which we find remarkably similar policies and once in power no significant deviation away from the pre-existing political direction - illustrates thatin many ways, democracy is in fact a sham. A smoke screen. A fig-leaf behind which the Oligarchs hide whilst buisy melting down the family silver ....
Whilst Totalitariun regimes employ the threat of force and the suppression of free expression to maintain power - the legitimacy of power is maintined within the Liberal democracy via coersion, disinformation and obfuscation: (with a large measure of carefully engineered popular mind candy thrown in).
All amounts to much the same thing though. Dictatorship.
"democracy is in fact a sham. A smoke screen. A fig-leaf behind which the Oligarchs hide..."
very true, i think! However, there IS a difference between Labour and the other parties:- Labour is based on the TUs making the Labour Party a [type of] workers' party.
What this actually means isn't clear to see, as the TUs are run by leaders that maybe have a tenuous link to the workers they represent and do act in favour of the bosses; this is like what the Labour leaders do (by leaders, as it is a 'parliamentary party' i mean the MPs; the LP was set up as a 'parliamentary party', by the way - by TU leaders that wanted a part of the parliamentary sham/pie 100-odd years ago).
I don't know what this "qualitative change" is that's supposed to have taken place in the LP, making it no longer a workers' party but now is supposedley purely bourgeois. Is it the war/occupation of afghanistan & iraq? The first (minority)Labour Govt was bombing Iraq in 1924! Britain has had a long involvement/interference in Afghanistan, but the point is that the LP in government (locally too!) ALWAYS do the bidding of the big imperialists!
It is a "reformist" party, which means that it is pro-capitalist (rather than anti-capitalist) - the mass membership of the LP (and that does include the millions of TUists that are affiliated) really just want to be able to get bigger crumbs from the table of capitalism....
anyway, i can go on if anyone wants! Am a Birmingham City Council care worker, UNISON member
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