RADICAL WORKERS’ BLOC AT TOLPUDDLE 2019

Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival and rally 2019 Friday, 19th to Sunday, 21st July 2019. View map No stall this year, apparently they were “oversubscribed”. Nah we don’t either, more time to get drunk then.

On the plus side the IWW are back, with a new improved stall run by Dorset branch.

Wob kitchen will run from Friday evening to Sunday lunch, next to the Big Tent; you’ll hardly notice the difference. Wessex Solidarity will make some of our literature catalogue available on the day. We’ve lots of new stuff that isn’t in the reference library as we’re running out of storage space – it hasn’t been updated for years. Why not get in touch now if there’s a subject you’re particularly interested in.

Catering Cadre: Comrade Les, our Wob kitchen chef is offering free training on outside and event catering for Radical Workers and groups who want to feed their members, homeless or unemployed workers in a safe and cost-effective way. Topics including:

• Basic Health safety and hygiene.
• Basic budget and Menu planning.
• Basic dietary requirements.
• Basic safe use of LPG and Butane gas cookers.

Let us know if you’re interested or come and see us about it at the festival.

Safe Space Policy: “don’t be a dick”.

This year we ask Radical Workers to be especially kind to members of the Prison Officers Association, as they are ever so sensitive, and easily upset by loud noises and rude words.

Bloody hell it was hot! Tolpuddle R.W.B. 2018

Kingfisher Victory!

Congratulations are due to the Kingfisher Mums and their supporters today, the CCG have finally capitulated.

Confounding  the many faces set against this campaign, including both of Oliver Letwin’s, with his ugly henchman Richard Grosvenor-Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax M.P., full consultant-led maternity and Paediatric services will be retained at Dorset County Hospital.

Full respect to the Mums who for three years now have maintained a relentless struggle in the teeth of abject treachery and deceit from local politicians and NHS officials, whilst bringing up their families and caring for some profoundly unwell and disabled children. We especially salute the tireless Naomi Patterson.

As history shall recall, Working Class women are a force to be reckoned with.

We didn’t even need to smash anything up, this time.

The NHS was built by the Working Class for the Working Class. Drugs and medical equipment are made by workers not capitalists. Cleaners, doctors, nurses, midwives, porters and technicians are workers. It belongs to us, it’s not a source of revenue for the socially useless. Keep your filthy grasping bourgeois hands off it!

To celebrate, here’s a song about vampires:

BETRAYAL!

The scheming charlatans of Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group have gone back on their word yet again and announced plans to run down local maternity services, bypassing the promised public consultation. The cuts, which are being presented as a fait accompli, will take place with undue haste, despite (or perhaps because of) years of solid public opposition. No one wants them; an internet search will reveal numerous glowing testimonials from relieved parents and sponsored events to raise funds for this universally acclaimed facility. W.S. have known for some time that their long term agenda is to reduce D.C.H. to a pointless cottage hospital, then close it.

Statement from the Save Kingfisher and SCBU at DCH campaign group:

“Plans for Maternity Services and Special Care Baby Unit at Dorset County Hospital to be downgraded, are now going ahead without public consultation. Three maternity rooms are being transformed into a midwife led unit and babies born under 32 weeks and sick babies will be sent to Poole Hospital. The plans will take effect within a matter of weeks. With the setting up of a Triage Unit as well, this brings maternity and SCBU services at DCH another step closer to being a low risk unit. By the time the public consultation on whether to make Bournemouth Hospital the main centre for Maternity and Paediatric care in Dorset takes place, DCH will have already transferred much of this care to Poole Hospital. The public are in effect being denied a say on what happens to Maternity and Neonatal services here in West Dorset.”

Shock at plans to downgrade maternity services before public consultation even begins. From Dorset Echo.

The plot to shut SCBU was first uncovered back in 2009, as reported by Dorset Echo  The chairman of the NHS trust Robin SeQueira subsequently resigned rather than implement the cuts, and staff were publicly calling for the remaining board members to be sacked. The trust’s medical director Dr Nick Hateboer (£140,000-£145,000 p.a.) insisted:

“We know that the public are concerned about the future of hospital services, including maternity and the special care baby unit (SCBU) – however, we have no plans to close these departments. We understand how important these services are to the community.”

Dr Hateboer also left in Sept 2011.

According to the Echo:

… a hospital source who confirmed that the baby units were under threat described the latest announcement as a ‘smokescreen’ to ‘calm the troops’ while decisions were made. The source said:

“There’s been a tremendous furore in the hospital internally. A lot of the hospital staff, especially at lower levels, are very concerned and members of the public have also been complaining to the hospital.”

“I think this is a smokescreen. The board of directors realise they’re under the microscope and I know several are thinking about resigning.”

We won’t close – county hospital u-turn over baby units

In Feb 2014, the unit was rated among the top 15 maternity services in the UK for care quality and safety on nine clinical indicators including caesarean rates, length of stay, complications, re-admissions and injuries, as well as three indicators from the Care Quality Commission’s maternity survey. The result put Dorset County Hospital among the top ten per cent of maternity providers in the country. The unit then received £276,000 of funding from the government’s Improving Maternity Care Settings Fund, to develop facilities for mothers with complex mental health needs and build two en-suite rooms between the maternity unit and SCBU for parents of babies on the ward.

Meanwhile, the C.C.G. turned its attention to the pathology service, but was thwarted by another public outcry.

In May 2015 they tried again, announcing “an overhaul of Dorset’s healthcare”, claiming that “experts in paediatric medicine and care are indicating that it is not necessary to have large and increasing numbers of inpatient beds for children.” The C.C.G. ‘s proposals, which would go to public consultation, included having just one ward for seriously ill children and one baby unit for the county – in East Dorset. Dorchester would be reduced to a Paediatric Assessment Unit with consultants available 16 hours a day. Children with serious illnesses or needing long-term care would have to travel to the acute hospital, located in either Bournemouth or Poole.

The hospital governors were disparaging accusing the C.C.G. of “making it up on the hoof”. Mothers responded with a flash demo outside their meeting place, Vespasian House. A week later, two and a half thousand people marched through Dorchester

At the beginning of July 2015 The Kingfisher mums’ campaign was again told, this time by chartered accountant Tim Goodson and chairman Forbes ‘Dr Death’ Watson, that SCBU was now safe and even asked to take it off their banner!

From Dorset Echo. HANDS OFF OUR WARDS: Health bosses insist they aren’t proposing changes to SCBU- but can’t make any promises about Kingfisher

Forbes Watson, Lyme Regis’ sinister “Dr Death”.

Some awkward questions were asked at a public meeting and the proposals were shelved for a year, meanwhile a fraudulent review was conducted costing £2.9 million, culminating in a farcical presentation at which the option to downgrade the SCBU from treating 28 week to 32 week babies was broached by Mr Goodson, the more premature to be shipped anywhere from Poole to Southampton. The later is now probable, as Poole is destined to be left without either A & E or maternity wards.

The CCG stressed that there never had been any consideration of closing the SCBU.

They further suggested splitting the facilities with Yeovil hospital, which as a heckler pointed out, is in Somerset! Yeovil immediately dismissed the idea.

Will you just look at all this bollocks!

Betrayed: this premature baby would not have survived had these proposals been in place at the time.

Enemies of the people: Who are the C.C.G.? You can read the full history of their plot to downgrade and close Dorset County Hospital here:

It’s time these sinister crooks came clean and admitted who they’re flogging the site to.

Actions against all this will follow, watch this site for details.

March to save Kingfisher and SCBU at Dorset County Hospital! Saturday 17 September in Dorchester

Note date has changed to avoid clashing with the county show.

“Again we need to show the CCG that they can’t play with our children’s lives we need Kingfisher and SCBU, not forgetting maternity. Please join us at 1pm at top o town car park with a view to be setting off at 1.30pm. Speakers TBC.  After the March the Dorchester Round tables have their cider festival with live bands and plenty of entertainment for your children, we will finish the March at the borough gardens in time for the festival to start.”

facebook event

The entire N.H.S. is under siege from this parasitic regime, we need every bastard we can get out for this, come on!

Who are the C.C.G. kidding, is it you?

You should have been there on Wednesday at the Dorset open C.C.G. meeting; no, really, you should have. With protestors from all over the county we had just enough to fill the available seating and an overflow room but the long awaited angry pitchfork-wielding mob is still holding out on us. The whole rigmarole resulted from an off the cuff remark at an earlier open meeting last summer when one of our number asked to see the costing. The following day it was announced the decision was to be deferred until now. Evidently they hadn’t bothered to do the costing, since the decision had already been taken and they think we’re a bunch of fucking yokels. They’ve since spent £2.9 million on a ‘review’.

The suits staged a piece of choreographed P.R. bullshit, commencing with a presentation involving some silly diagrams projected on a side wall that fewer than half of us could see, accompanied by 30 minutes (it seemed longer) of that meaningless management drivel they all spout – what the actual fuck is a “pivotal provider”? We were subjected to a patronising lecture about how they were going to encourage us all to give up smoking and take more exercise, as if all our health conditions were our own fault. There’s going to be an ‘engagement road show’ (like Radio One?)

Hidden amongst the overarching visions, stakeholder engagements and enabling workstreams were a few gems. They face challenges in recruiting staff – why do you think that is? Having pissed off every other health worker the government is currently at war with its future consultants and that isn’t going to end well.

The threat to children’s services we have been staving off for so long remains, there is a recommendation to amalgamate these facilities with Yeovil hospital, which as a heckler pointed out, is in Somerset! Yeovil are not keen.

There is talk of care in the community or the home. The meaning of this will be familiar to anyone with experience of personal care. The council, or in this case the health service, pays a provider through the nose for half-hour care slots by agency staff on poverty wages. The half hour includes travel time so you only get twenty minutes, about ten of which are spent filling in paperwork.

Incredibly, the review has determined that aggregate travel times from Bournemouth to Poole, and vice-versa, are equivalent. This was challenged from the floor and we were dismissively told some folk had gone out with GPS and things.

The yokels were not impressed. It was pointed out that Poole hospital is a ten minute walk from the railway station whereas R.B.H. is a 40 minute bus ride from the Bournemouth one – when the bus actually shows up. R.B.H. sits in a traffic bottleneck that is virtually impassable for a couple of hours a day. Six streams of traffic converge on a single-lane roundabout then the eastbound traffic goes over a bridge that “was built for a horse and cart”. Even with a blue light on, the ambulance has to queue for traffic lights like everyone else, because there simply isn’t any room to make way. We recall a flooding incident that backed the whole thing up for an hour and a half.

I’ll spell it out for them: if I had an accident at Bournemouth rail station I would go to Poole hospital. The material accompanying the presentation even more extravagantly claimed that:

“… access to primary care and community services … would be possible by car within 8 minutes for 90% of the population … with just 25 [as opposed to 135 at present] well placed primary care locations”.

That’s pure fantasy. Tell you what, I defy any of them to drive into R.B.H. from Cooper Dean roundabout, park their car, and walk to hospital reception in 8 minutes.

There were many references to financial sustainability and overspending. We are told the N.H.S. has a huge funding gap, now we all know why this is, and it’s got nothing to do with obesity or the ageing population. Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) allow moneylenders to ‘own’ things other people require to live – such as roads, hospitals and schools – which, like everything else, are simply the products of our labour and ingenuity. With up-front privatisation thoroughly discredited, successive governments have handed the infrastructure over to cash-rich corporations who expect us to lease it back from them over decades at a huge premium. The advantage to the politician is that the transfer of public assets to the private sector is temporarily invisible, as is the magnitude of the debt. So it’s a sort of payday loan, by the time the payments become crippling the politician is long gone, having moved on and with luck, landed a job with one of these glorified pawnbrokers. When the state was forced to bail out the financial institutions after the crash it found itself paying for public assets it no longer owned. Servicing these loans is now given priority over providing services; vampire-like, they are sucking the life out of the N.H.S. The agenda of the government is to shut down and amalgamate as many non-P.F.I. hospitals as possible, nevertheless, the U.K. still spends a smaller portion of its G.D.P. on healthcare than Germany, France or the U.S.A.

Capitalists have a problem; every so often they run out of things to steal. A couple of hundred years ago they stole our land and forced us into waged labour. Every day bosses, bankers and landlords rob us of the fruits of that labour, leaving us only the barest means of subsistence. But as technology makes things easier and simpler to produce, labour gets less and less profitable, or even necessary. Even with us all consuming flat out, there isn’t much to do and most of us are simply an inconvenience to them, especially when we’re too sick, old or young to be adding value to their capital. All that’s left to pillage are things like education and healthcare, which are not commodities but social duties. How can any social grouping possibly “overspend” on the health and wellbeing of the very people who create its wealth?

Following some unconvincing questions from the panel, and a vigorous rebuttal from the floor, a farcical voting ritual unanimously endorsed their decision to concentrate A & E in Bournemouth and reduce Poole to a basic outpatients. This will do for the kid with the saucepan on his head and the rugby player with the singed arsehole, but nothing life-threatening. Here’s a consultant’s view We are told Dorchester is safe, and frankly we don’t believe a word. In 2014, a patients’ survey declared D.C.H.  Emergency department as the best in the country. It would have looked a bit odd if they’d tried to shut it then so they went for the path lab instead, then when that  was foiled decided to sneak up on it by squeezing out paediatrics and maternity.

A note to newspaper and T.V. editors: we are not “concerned”, we know what they are up to and we are fucking livid.

We hope for a larger and rowdier protest at the next one, bring your mates, and a pitchfork.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/30/accident-emergency-overhaul-shelved-warning-political-backlash

How PFI is crippling the NHS

http://www.nhsforsale.info/privatisation-list/surgery/the-great-pfi-swindle.html

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/caroline-molloy/peterborough-hospital-nhs-and-britains-privatisation-racket

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/anna-marriott/world-bank-pfi-hospital-and-destruction-of-nations-healthcare-system

RMT LGBT History Month – Special Benefit Screening of the Film ‘Pride’ in Bridgwater, 25th February 2016.

The National Union of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union (Bristol branch) in association with Somerset Film will be screening ‘Pride’ the BAFTA award-winning comedy at The Engine Room, 52, High Street, Bridgwater TA6 3BL on February 25th 2016. David ‘Dai’ Donovan, whose story the film tells, will be there in person to introduce and answer questions after the screening. facebook event

Doors 7.30pm for 8pm start.Tickets £5 or £3 conc. from the Engine Room. 01278 433187 or Somerset Film

Somerset Film producer Deb Richardson said:

”We’re delighted to be showing ‘Pride’ as part of the RMT’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month. This screening is a special benefit for the Engine Room and the RMT’s Widows and Orphans Fund. The coming together of two different groups to benefit others reflects what the film is all about.”

It won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut and stars Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West and Paddy Considine.

Save SCBU and Kingfisher at DCH Demo at Vespasian house, Dorchester 15th July .

Family-friendly demo outside meeting of Clinical Commissioning Group, 15th July at 14:00 Vespasian House Barrack Road, DT1 1TG Dorchester, Dorset, to save paediatric services at Dorset County Hospital. Get there if you can.

Facebook event

If you can’t Email CCG   Phone: 01305 368900

Working class kids’ lives matter!

March for SCBU and Kingfisher at Dorset County Hospital. 13th June 2015

Residents of West Dorset and supporters will march through Dorchester on Saturday 13th June, determined to retain paediatric and maternity services at Dorset County Hospital.

Meet at 11:00 at Top O Town Car Park Bridport Road, DT1 1XT Dorchester, Dorset.

facebook page

Mass march for SCBU and kingfisher ward

Autonomy film show in Bridport Sat 13th June 2015.

Events organised by others.

Wed 3rd June. Dorset Israel/ Palestine Peace Group.
Gilad Atzmon – Israeli-born international jazz artist, composer and author, talks on: ‘From A to Zion – truth and concealment in Palestine and Israel’ Free entry – donations.
7pm. United Church Hall, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1EE.

Sat 6 June. Dorset Socialists meeting.
Tackling Climate Change. Speaker: Peter Barton, Green Party.
1.30pm Colliton Club, Dorchester.

Sat/ Sun, 6-7th June. Renewable Energy Co-ops.
Jon Halle facilitates the renewable technology workshops. £75. http://stirtoaction.com/workshop/
10am – 5pm. Chapel in the Garden, East Street Bridport.

Wed 10th June. Somerset Branch of the Communist Party.
Public meeting in Yeovil; Which Way Forward after the General Election? Speaker: Rob Griffiths, General Secretary, Communist Party of Britain.
7:30pm. Unity Hall, Central Road, Yeovil BA20 1JL.

Wednesday 17th June Just Press Mini-Festival of Dissenting Ideas & Book Fair 2015. Reverence or Reason in an Ecological Crisis? Two short illustrated talks about nature.
Lucy Goodison: If God were a Tree
Horatio Morpurgo: Climate & Culture: Twin Tipping-Points Entry £4 Drinks & vegetarian food BOOKS FOR SALE
7.30pm for 8pm W.I. Hall, North St., Bridport

Friday 10th July Photographic postcards: A People’s Art? Austin and Potts, two early Bridport Photographers.
Illustrated talk by Carlos Guarita and launch of his booklet: ‘Clarence Austin the Photographer and the Bridport Wildcat Women’. Entry: £4 Refreshments BOOKS FOR SALE
7pm for 7.30pm W.I. Hall, North St., Bridport

Sat 11th July Pop-Up Play! Come to watch or join in you want!
Karl Marx at Home from the The Domestic Theatre Handbook Author Beth Shaw will be there in person to start the play. Entry: FREE Refreshments BOOKS FOR SALE
5.30pm W.I.Hall, North St., Bridport

Sat 11th July for 8pm Agit-prop & Activism since the Sixties
Readings, performances, reminiscences and ideas from the psychedelic 60s to austerity Britain. What was it all about? What does it mean now? BOOKS FOR SALE Entry: £6 incl. glass wine. Vegetarian food.
7.30pm W.I.Hall, North St., Bridport

Stop benefit sanctions, public meeting Bridgwater 14th April 2015