And Finally I Voted, Making My Vote Count, part 6

I voted today, but I wasn’t really inspired by any of my local candidates to do so. None of them stood out as the ideal candidate, none of them inspired me that they would make a great MP for my area. They barely seemed to be treading water as campaign politicians, none of their answers to my questions inspired or challenged me, and they showed so little knowledge and understanding of the NHS. Now the NHS is a complicated subject, I say that enough times in my writing, but it is such an important political subject that anyone wanting to make a career in politics should have at least a working knowledge of it.

I don’t know if the poor quality of candidates was due to my area or is this due to the quality of politicians in general, the fact that I live in a safe Labour seat (the other candidates don’t stand a chance of being elected so don’t fight the election very hard, and the MP is so secure she can just phone in her campaign), or is it because this was a snap election, so snap that it seemed to even catch the Conservative party unawares?

The previous General Election, 2015, there was a lot of talk about “voter apathy” and politicians not engaging with voters, especially young voters. This time I didn’t hear that repeated but I am sure that it was because this was a snap election, no one sure it coming because Theresa May repeatedly she wouldn’t be calling a snap election until she suddenly did. But this time I saw no more engagement with voters by my local candidates than I did in 2015 (I blogged about trying to do that in 2015 here, here, here, here, here and here). I feel just as disillusioned with my local candidates today as I did on Election Day 2015.

What mind up my mind who to vote for was the national campaigns and what the political parties and their leaders were saying, especially what they were promising to do for the NHS. It was the national parties’ promises on the NHS that swayed my mind, and nothing that my local candidates said or did.

I feel it is my responsibility to vote, so I vote at every election. I live in a democrat society and therefore I have a responsibility to vote, to be involved in the political process. Plus, how can I criticise the government of the day (And I do, just read previous blogs of mine) if I didn’t vote. I just wish our politicians saw it as their duty to engage with their voters.

Drew Payne

Making My Vote Count, part 5

One day to go and I finally get some contact from three of my local candidates, I had to almost shame them into replying to me though. Late this morning my frustration boiled over and I sent an email to the five candidates who have still not replied to me. I told them all how disgusted I was by their silence and how they had done nothing to earn my vote. Well, surprise, surprise, three of the candidates replied to my email this afternoon.

I finally heard from The Green Party candidate, the Liberal Democrat and Labour candidates; but their answers were not anyway satisfactory.

The Green Party candidate sent me a short email were he blamed the troubles in the NHS due to the Conservatives running it down to make it ready to be privatised and sold off to “shadowy” city bankers. It read like a paranoid rant of a conspiracy theorist, not the discussion of a politician and he made no reference to any of his party’s policies. It was a strange and very immature email, I don’t know how it was supposed to persuade me to vote for him because he answered none of my questions

The Liberal Democrat candidate first said he hadn’t replied to me because he received a lot of emails from lobbying groups and so missed my email. I wasn’t happy with this, he was telling me he wasn’t well organised. How would he run an MP’s office if he cannot organise his own emails?

He emailed the text of an opinion piece he said he wrote for our local newspaper and which he said would answer my questions (I’ve searched the newspaper’s website and I can’t find this opinion piece. He didn’t say which edition it was published in either). Briefly, the opinion piece ran like this; first he warms NHS staff not to strike. Then he linked the shortage of staff to the rise in infant mortality rates in the UK. He said it is “not a budget problem,” then he proceeded to complain about the cost of agency staff in the NHS, implying that an agency nurse is paid £35 to £40 per hour for a shift in A&E. He blamed low pay on poor short and long term planning, and said the way forward isn’t national pay bargaining but local pay levels. He says as a politician “it is my duty to focus on solving the underlying problems of low pay, which is hurting both patients and nurses.” Yet he offers no solutions.

This opinion pieces does not answer any of the questions I raised with him. I felt very patronised and that he was fobbing me off with something he’d previously written, he could not be bothered to read my email and answer my questions. Is this the behaviour of a potential MP?

The Labour candidate emailed a scanned in copy of a letter that she said had been posted to me. The letter was scanned in upside-down and dated 5^th June. As of today I have not received this letter.

Her letter did show that at least she had read my email. The first three-quarters of the letter was reflecting back to me the points and facts I’d raised in my email and agreeing with me, blaming the Tories for their policies towards nursing. It is nice to be agreed with but that wasn’t why I emailed her, I wanted to know what she would do to support nursing and the NHS. The last paragraph did contain what she was would do, she will campaign “to ensure a more secure, better future for our NHS and the nurses who work at the heart of it,” if she is re-elected.

That is a nice sentiment but her letter was very low on policies and political commitment. She said Labour would remove the pay cap on nurses and restore the bursary for student nurses. But I was hoping to hear more from her, she is our standing MP. She didn’t tell me what her voting record was and what local issues she has campaigned on, our local NHS has seen the close of services at our local hospital and seen walk-in centres closed since 2010.

The Conservative and Peoples Christian Alliance candidates still remain very quiet and I haven’t had any reply from either of them.

I do live in a very safe Labour constituency, is this lack of engagement due to this, the other candidates do not stand any chance of being elected so that they are barely campaigning and that the Labour candidate has already got the vote sown up. Or is this typical now of modern politics, a General Election is all about electing a Prime Minister and local politics are of no concern.

The basic MP’s salary is £74,962 (1). An election campaign should be were a politician works to show that they worth electing as our MP. So far none of these candidates have shown me they are worth a fraction of that salary, and tomorrow is the General Election.

I will vote tomorrow but none of these six candidates have shown me they are worth my vote.

Drew Payne

Making My Vote Count, part 4

As I keep saying, a week is certainly a long time in politics, and it is a long time with this blog as I try and engage with my local candidates. It seems I am getting closer to actually engaging with them, accept it is now only six days to the election.

Last weekend The Green Party candidate finally put up his email address on the Who Can I Vote For website, the last of my local candidates to do so. It does seem very last minute, with a little over a week to the General Election. Of course I emailed him my questions (1), how quickly he’ll reply to me I just don’t know.

Monday I came home from work and found another campaign leaflet from the Liberal Democrat candidate. This leaflet was very high on promises about Brexit and supporting local residents, though it is very low on measurable policies. He lists five reasons to vote for him, none of them are about the NHS. The front of his leaflet does say, “More money for NHS hospital, reducing waiting times.” What he does not say is how much more money he will give and by how much he would reduce waiting times. It could be as little as £1 more money and reduce waiting times by 1 minute. This statement is so vague, it is unmeasurable.

Thursday I received my first reply to my email. The UKIP candidate sent me an email and she actually answered some of my questions. Her points were:

• UKIP will end PFI (Private Finance Initiatives) financing of hospitals and cancel current PFI contacts.
•  They will raise the tax allowance to £13,000, before any tax is paid, and they will raise the point at which the top rate of tax to £55,000.
• They will give an extra £9 billion a year, until 2021/22, in funding to the NHS and an extra £2 billion to social care funding.
• They will increase the number of nurses trained, fund nurses returning to work, and end the 1% wage cap on nurses.
• They will train more emergency medicine consultants.
• And UKIP will “establish a Royal Commission to find a way forward that allows the NHS to hold fast to its values while meeting the challenges of the future”.

Now these claims sound very reasonable, on the surface, but a look deeper at them finds there’s not a lot of substance to them.

PFI is a big finance burden on the NHS. The private businesses, financing the original deals, are owed over £209 billion over the next 35 years (2). The money paid to them, in 2015 alone, equalled 0.5% of Britain’s Gross Domestic. These deals are draining money from the NHS but ending them is going to be very difficult and expensive, an expense that the NHS might not be able to meet at once.

Increasing the tax allowance will help a lot of people, nurses included. Raising the top level of tax to £55,000 will not benefit many nurses. The current top rate of tax starts at £45,001 (3). At present you have to be on mid-point Band 8a or Band 8b and above to start paying the higher rate of tax. Under UKIP proposals you will have to be on top Band 8b and above to start paying the top rate of tax. Either way the vast majority of nurses will never earn enough to be effected by the top rate of tax, but raising both the tax allowance and top rate of tax will decrease the amount of money the government raises and that could directly affect NHS funding.

UKIP will give the NHS an extra £9 billion a year in funding; but the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, has said that the NHS needs an extra £10 billion just to keep going (4). This doesn’t include any expanding of services, and last winter’s crisis showed that the NHS did not have any extra capacity to meet any increase in demand. The NHS needs to expand services as demand increases year on year, just providing enough funding to keep the lights on, at present, will not allow for this. As for social care funding, The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services estimated that £4.6 billion has already been cut from social care budgets since 2010 (5), an extra £2 billion is less than half of that. We have already seen that underfunding social care has a direct effect on increasing demand for NHS services.

They will also increase the number of nurses trained, which is desperately needed, but do not say by how many. It takes three years to train a nurse, plus the time to create these extra training places, so we won’t be seeing these extra newly qualified nurses for at least four years, and these nurses will not have the skills and experience of the nurses the NHS is already losing each day.

They say they will increase nurses’ pay but again they do not say by how much. Since 2010 nurses’ pay has fallen by 14% in real terms (6). Are they going to give nurses at 14% as soon as they get into office? If they don’t give exact numbers how can we hold them to their promises?

The NHS already has a 10% shortage of doctors (7) and back in November 2016 was facing a 3,000 short fall in A&E doctors (8). Training more emergency medicine consultants is a good thing, but without the support of a team of junior doctors those consultants are going to have a near impossible job, and will we be able to keep them?

A Royal Commission is a formal inquiry into an organisation and/or a situation and is usually chaired by a senior legal figure. Is it the right way to identify the problems facing the NHS and to provide solutions? Governments can ignore a commission’s recommendations in part or in whole (The Leveson enquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press) and they can drag on at great expense (Royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse). Also the government sets the remit of a Royal Commission, they will decide what the commission will look at and what they will not. A cleaver government could even insure that a commission comes to the conclusions they want to hear. A Royal Commission into the NHS could takes years to come to its commissions, years which could see the situation in the NHS becomes far worse.

She wrote nothing about UKIP’s policy to restrict immigration (9). The NHS relies heavily on non UK workers, 11% of all NHS staff and 26% of NHS doctors are non-British (10). We still don’t train enough doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to meet the demand, we need non-British staff for the NHS to survive.

I would love to put the other candidates’ answers to the same level of scrutiny but I cannot because none of the other candidates has bothered to reply to my email. I emailed my local candidates on the following dates (I couldn’t get all their email addresses at the same time):

• Labour candidate – email sent on 11/5/17
• Liberal Democrats candidate – email sent on 11/5/17
• Conservative candidate – email sent on 18/5/17
• Peoples Christian Alliance candidate – email sent on 18/5/17
• UKIP candidate – email sent on 26/5/17
• Green Party candidate – email sent on 28/5/17

So far only the UKIP candidate has replied to my email, and I emailed her much later than the majority of the other candidates. I was surprised that it was the UKIP candidate was the first to reply. I live in an intercity, multi-cultural, London constituency, not the natural home for UKIP. At the 2015 General Election UKIP barely campaigned here, so I wasn’t expecting to hear from her this time.

What I am most disgusted about is the lack of contact I have received from the big three political parties. They barely seemed interested in my vote, they are barely doing anything to win my vote. I have had campaign leaflets from them but nothing else, and all those leaflets were very low on facts and details. I know this is a snap election but it feels as if the one person my vote is important to is me, it certainly doesn’t seem important to five out of six of my local candidates.

Drew Payne

Making My Vote Count, part 3

They say a week is a long time in politics, but in my experience politics also moves very slowly.

The Christian Peoples Alliance candidate has finally put his email address up on the Who Can I Vote For website, so of course I have emailed him. The Green Party candidate still hasn’t put his email address up there, so I still cannot contact him.

I have still not had any replies to my emails from any of the other candidates and it’s now just under two weeks until the election.

We have had election leaflets pushed through our front door though. One each from the Labour and Liberal Democrats candidates on Monday, one from the Conservative candidate on Wednesday, and one from the UKIP candidate today. None of these leaflets come even close to answering my questions. The UKIP candidate does have her email address on her leaflet so I have been able to finally email her today.

The Labour candidate’s leaflet said she will, if re-elected, “Revitalise our cash-starved health service ensuring it stays free, safe and reliable.” She doesn’t say how she will achieve this very lofty aim, nor does she say what she has previously done as our MP to support and “revitalise” the NHS. Her leaflet is high on highly emotional language and low on measurable promises.

The Liberal Democrats candidate’s leaflet talks a lot about Brexit, over half of his A4 leaflet is given over to what he claims to do around Brexit. His leaflet makes no direct promise for the NHS, but he does pledge to merge social care and NHS services in my borough, and “better funding arrangements”. Though he doesn’t state what these would be and were they would come from.

The Conservative candidate’s leaflet makes no reference to the NHS at all. Obviously this is of no concern to him. His leaflet does make three promises: 1, to support Theresa May in all her Brexit negotiations; 2, to “empower” local communities to take “action” on litter, dog mess and anti-social behaviour; 3, to “champion” the self-employed and small business owners. I cannot see any of these helping the NHS out of its current crisis or resolving our shortage of nurses.

The UKIP candidate’s leaflet had five pledges on it and one of them applied to the NHS. It was called “NHS Before Foreign Aid”, and stated, “Fund 20,000 nurses and 10,000 GPs; Scrap hospital parking fees.” She doesn’t say were these extra nurses and GPs will come from, seeing as there are already shortfalls in both professions, and one of her other pledges is “Cut Immigration”. If we can’t recruitment nurses and doctors from other countries we’re only going to add to the shortage, we’re certainly not training enough. She says nothing about NHS funding. She implies that the foreign aid budget will be spent on the NHS. Last year’s foreign budget was £12.1 billion (1). Last year NHS Trusts were underfunded by £2.4 billion (2) and by 2020 the NHS is expected to hand back £20 billions of funding in “efficiency” savings (2). The head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, has said that the NHS needs an extra £10 billion just to keep going (2). Also, Britain is in the top thirty richest countries in the world (3), why can’t we fully fund both the NHS and foreign aid?

I would to love to put these questions to the above candidates, ask them to fully explain what they mean and what they would actually do, but I can’t. None of them have replied to my email, so far I have been unable to find any local hustings were I could put my questions to the candidates, and no one has knocked on my front door conversing for my vote, certainly not any of the candidates. Neither of the local Labour or Conservative party websites list any opportunities to meet their candidates (The other four parties standing don’t even have local party websites, or none that I can find).

All the contact I’ve received from my local candidates, who all want me to vote for them, has been four, small leaflets. All of these leaflets are high on emotive language and low on facts and measurable promises. All of these leaflets were controlled by the candidates, they say what the candidates want to say. None of them even came close to answering my questions to them (4).

The basic MP’s salary is £74,962 (5). None of these candidates seem to be even putting in half the work to earn this high salary. Why should I vote for any of them?

Drew Payne