Making My Vote Count, part 2

Well, so far my attempt to engage with my local candidates has fallen at almost the first fence, I cannot contact most of them.

There are six candidates standing in my constituency:

• Labour (standing MP)
• Conservative
• Liberal Democrats
• Green Party
•  UKIP
• Christian Peoples Alliance

Only two of them, the Labour candidate and the Liberal Democrats one, has their email address on the Who Can I Vote For website. The Conservative candidate has his twitter account listed there, but only that, and the others have no contact details. A Google search got me the Facebook page for the Green Party candidate, but nothing else.

So I have emailed the Labour and Liberal Democrats candidate on the 11^th May with my questions, still no reply from either of them. I have tweeted the Conservative candidate and Facebook’d the Green Party candidate, asking both of them why their email addresses aren’t available. I have no way to contact the other two candidates.

These people want me to vote for them and yet they do not make it possible for me to engage with them. It feels as if they don’t want to hear from me but they expect me to vote for them just because I agree with their political party. Is it me or does this seem very lazy politics?

Drew Payne

Update – Thursday 18^th May

What a difference three days make. Today I found that both the Conservative and the Christian Peoples Alliance candidates have their email addresses on the Who Can I Vote For website. Naturally I have emailed them both with my questions.

The Green Party candidate has now got a link to his LinkedIn page there, but still no email address. His LinkedIn page tells me that he is an “IT Specialist”, whatever that is, but there is still no way to contact him directly.

The UKIP candidate only has a link to her personal website there, but the link doesn’t work. Click on it and you’re taken to a web page saying the Server Can’t Be Found. So I have even less chance of contacting her.

The Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates still haven’t replied to my email, even though it’s now a week since I emailed them.

This still leaves me feeling very cynical, do these people even want to engage with me, a voter? Yet also, was this election called so suddenly and quickly that it has caught all the political parties off guard, even the Conservatives; or is this what living in a safe Labour seat feels like, the other candidates are only half-heartedly fighting this election, at best.

Oh well, two steps forward...

Drew Payne

 

Making My Vote Count

No one could not have notice that there is a general election on the 8^th June. Not many of us saw this election coming, and it can be argued that many of us don’t even want this election, but it is happening. 23.59, on 22 May is the last day we can register to vote (1), but we can register on line here. 

Already Brexit is already dominating the media coverage of this election but an election should never be about one subject. An election should be about the whole of a Government’s policies and how they have behaved in government. This government’s record on the NHS has been anything but high quality.

We have just come out of another winter crisis, the third winter crisis the NHS has suffered in a row (2), even though the past three winters have all been mild, without any long cold spells (3, 4. 5). And this is only one of the many problems facing the NHS.

As nurses we have a voice and we need to make our voices heard in this election. We must stop the agenda just being about Brexit and what the politicians want us to hear. Health unions have already called for this election to be about the state of the NHS (6), unions including the RCN, BMA, Unite, UNISON and the Royal College of Midwives. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has already launched its “Nursing Counts” campaign (7), to ensure healthcare priorities are at the heart of all the political parties’ manifestos. 

But what can we do as individuals? In reality we don’t elect a Prime Minister at an election, we don’t vote for a specific political leader, what we do is elect our local MP, who then has the responsibility of representing us in parliament. Therefore shouldn’t we ensure that the candidate we vote for has our best interest at heart?

At the last election I emailed all my local candidates asking them how they would support the NHS, their responses were certainly a mixed bag and often not what I wanted to hear (You can read my blogs about it all here, here, here and here). But this hasn’t deterred me. At this election I am going to do exactly the same. This time I will also blog about it and the experience, we need to engage with candidates or how else will they know our concerns. At the end of this blog I’ve pasted the email I’ve sent to my local candidates, complete with reference links. Feel free to use any or all of it if you want to email your local candidates too (Details of your local candidates can be found here).

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every nurse in the country emailed their local candidates and quizzed them on how they were going to support the NHS? Those candidates wouldn’t be able to ignore the problems facing us and the NHS. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone who reads this blog emails their local candidates? We need to make our voices heard, we need the candidates to listen to our concerns, otherwise the media will make all the running and all we will hear about is Brexit. Nursing and the NHS deserves better.

Drew Payne

Why Should I Vote For You? email

Dear ______,

I live in the ______ constituency and I intend voting at this coming election, but my vote is very precious to me, I only get one vote, and I want to make my vote count. As a candidate, you want to represent me in parliament, I want to know that you will support my concerns and worries if you were elected.

I am a nurse, working in the NHS, and I am very worried about the state of nursing today. Nursing is under threat from the following factors:

•         Last year there were 23,443 empty nursing posts in the NHS, 9% of the nursing workforce (a1).
•      93% of NHS Trusts reported shortages of registered nurses and 78 per cent reported difficulty in finding nurses for hard-to-fill nursing vacancies (jobs vacant for three months and longer) (a2).
•         Last year 5% of nurses did not renew their Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) membership (a3), they effectively left nursing because you cannot practice as a Registered Nurse unless you are registered with the NMC.
•         There also has been a 92% fall in EU nurses coming to work here since the Brexit Referendum (a4).
• ·       Since 2009 there has been a 28% fall in District Nurses numbers and the Community Nurse workforce has shrunk by 8%, putting a huge strain on this important service (a5).
• ·         Since 2010, there has been a 15% fall in the number of student nurse training places (a6).
•         This year saw a 23% fall in people applying to train as a Register Nurse, after the scrapping of student nurse bursaries (a7, a8, a9, a10).
•          Nurses’ pay has fallen in real terms by 14% since 2010 (a11).
•          There has been a 50% increase in nurses applying for hardship grants since 2010 (a12), last year alone £250,000 was paid out in hardship grants (a13).
•          Last year there was a 3% increase in emergency admissions to hospital via A&E (a14), yet last year NHS funding only increased by 0.9%, as it has done year on year since 2010 (a15).

Nurses are the glue of healthcare, without us so much patient care just would not happen, yet our profession is being eroded. What would you do, if you were elected my MP, to reverse this erosion and to protect and value nursing? 

As I said, my vote is very important to me, as a voter and also as a nurse. Why should I vote for you in this coming election?

Yours,

Drew Payne (Mr),

(Email address) – to make sure they can reply to me

(Postal address) – to show that I live in their constituency

And Things Change

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 (a). This was the act of parliament that partly decriminalised male homosexuality (the law never acknowledged lesbian sex), it opened a crack in the wall and was the first step towards change in our society.

I came out when I was eighteen, more than thirty years ago, and overnight I lost almost all of my friends, I was ostracised just for being gay. It was a shocking experience that has left a lasting impact on me.

Today I am married to my husband Martin and work as a Community Nurse in North London. Everyone at work knows my husband and no one has a problem with him, I have almost forgotten the last time I experienced homophobia at work, certainly not in this job.

So much has changed since I was a teenager, changes I would never have believed back then. We have marriage equality, we have protections against discrimination at work and when we use businesses or services, the Equality Act (b). Lesbian and gay characters can be found on so many different television programs. We have won so many protections and rights under the law in this century that it makes our world almost unrecognisable from the one I first came out into.

So we can just relax and sit back, all the work has been done. Unfortunately no. Homophobia is still alive, it is just not as blatant as it used to be, and the NHS is still not an open and welcoming place to everyone.

In 2016 a BMA study found that over 70 percent of LGBT NHS doctors have experienced homophobia at work, and three quarters had not reported it because they feared it would not be taken seriously or they feared reprisals (1). “I don’t think the NHS is an LGBT-friendly environment”, said Dominic, one of the doctors contributing to the study. This type of homophobia isn’t restricted to doctors only.

Last year also saw the unsightly sceptical of NHS England going to court so they would not have to fund PrEP, the HIV prevention medication (2). If used correctly PrEP is 86% effective (3), far higher than most vaccines. If PrEP prevented heart disease or diabetes we would be welcoming it and there would be no question the NHS would provide it. But PrEP prevents HIV and NHS England felt it could justify not funding it, tapping into the homophobia around HIV.  A Nursing Standard Twitter poll at the time found that 54% thought PrEP should be self-funded and not provided by the NHS (4), and it was mostly nurses taking part in that poll.

There was a shocking spike in hate crimes following the referendum result last summer (6). Less publicised was the 147% rise in homophobic crimes in this period (7). Homophobia hasn’t gone away and the Brexit climate seems to be giving it oxygen again.

Brexit also raises another challenge for LGBT people. When Britain leaves the EU all the EU laws that are also part of our laws will be reviewed and we might lose many of them. EU Article 10 offers protect from discrimination, including on grounds of sexuality (8). Employment Framework Directive 2000/78 (9) protects people against discrimination at work on grounds of sexuality.

Many in the Conservative party have openly called for the repeal of the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act (9a 9b 9c), Theresa May has previously spoken of her dislike of the Human Rights Act (10). What laws, what protections will we lose as Britain separates from the EU? The government has given us no re-assurances, they barely seem to know what they want from Brexit itself.

In America, Donald Trump’s Government has taken a shocking turn. Almost all of his cabinet have previously gone on the record with their anti LGBT views (11). Within only a few hours of Trump becoming 54th president the LGBT section of the White House website disappeared (12a). Trump’s plans to slash federal funding for AIDS have been leaked (12b), and in only the last few days Trump has signed a “religious liberty” executive order (12c). Many LGBT American’s fear this will be only the beginning of the weakening of LGBTI rights in the United States, allowing discrimination against LGBT people in the name of “religious freedom”.

It is no longer true that what American does today we in Britain do tomorrow, but many people here still look to America. People, who have been campaigning for the repeal of marriage equality and LGBT protections, will be looking very keenly at Trump’s administration, especially as they roll back LGBT equality.

Peter Tatchell once said that LGBT people are the litmus test of how a society respects human rights (13). If a society doesn’t value diversity how will it value anyone? But why should nurses worry about human rights? Because if we don’t how can we nurse anyone with dignity.

(This was originally published as part of the Nursing Standard magazine’s LGBT History Month special, it was also published on the RCNi website here. Unfortunately you have to be registered with RCNi to view it. Therefore I have re-published it here, on my blog, after updating it.)

Drew Payne