Whose National Health Service is it?

And who should run it on our behalf? Some thoughts by ALAN SPENCE

“The transcendental authority of England is its people”. A people’s Health Service demands new beginnings. In the light of bitter opposition to Tory plans for the NHS, isn’t it time to look at a co-operative model as an alternative?

Those who work within the NHS should be able to manage GP surgeries, hospitals, research and educational units – indeed all areas of the health and care system within an employee-managed network based on co-operation.

Co-operation, of course, already exists in the operating theatre, where a team works with dedicated co-ordination as part of a normal work process. And it’s to be found in other areas of the NHS.

But the trouble begins when its members step outside this co-ordinating framework to become, respectively, members of the ruling, middle or working class.

Surgeons rule their team of doctors as did boyars of old Russia. At various stages of expertise, doctors are dependent on the goodwill of the “Mister” and seek a favourable nod from the next consultant in order to improve skills and gain a higher rate of pay and position for those in his/her team. As for non-medics, they take their chances with their own managers. But here wages and conditions are more directly obtained via union/ NHS negotiations.

Nor does the power of the “Mister” end with determining the fate of junior doctors. It stretches far wider – to “chummy” relations with members of the boards of governers, Carlton Club meetings, stately homes and ties through marriage, or public school. Such factors help to determine the way that the NHS proceeds on its pastoral care of the needy in our society.

This unique structure came about as a result of Nye Bevan’s necessary compromise, made to win support for getting a universal and all embracing health system as a going concern.

If it is thought that the mighty changes introduced into healing the sick by Nye Bevan trimmed their power, let them think again. It elevated them to a new and commanding height in the British economy, culture and society.

Put a leading surgeon in charge of a reform within the NHS and the outcome is geared to shifting the chairs around to provide a more comfortable position for a capitalist government to claim that changes that worsen middle and working people’s welfare are changes for the better.

THE GUILLEBAND REPORT:
Following the victory of Bevan’s view that a National Health system paid from taxation was superior to health provision from private insurance companies came the Guilleband Report of 1956. This had been set up by an alarmed Conservative government, certain that the NHS was ruinously expensive and a threat to financial stability. It decided that a Commission would confirm this threat, and allow them to disband this collectivist, heretical body before it did more damage to capitalistic individualism.

Conservative disappointment was huge when it reported that contrary to media scare stories, the NHS was not a strain on resources – and, indeed items previously dropped from the free provision introduced in 1948 (free prescriptions, dental and ophthalmic services) could be re-introduced without straining resources.

Guilleband’s other discovery was that the NHS’s percentage of the GDP was hardly different from that in pre-war Britain – some three per cent.

The reason? Before the war, those working on low wages could obtain sick and other benefits from National Insurance. But wives and children were excluded, as were employees on higher salaries. As a result, a galaxy of private insurance companies gained weekly payments to cover the cost of sickness, death, etc., with many GPs running a collecting system to pay for the treatment of wives and children.

Shortly after the NHS and other social benefits were launched, most health insurance companies dried up. Only a few survived, catering mainly for the rich. The majority of citizens followed the consensus that there was no point in paying twice for something that was provided for out of general taxation.

And the ragged assembly of government asylums, local authority maternity, fever, cottage and voluntary hospitals were brought together along with GPs’ surgeries (held in shops, spare rooms or wherever). They were assembled into a more logical structure to meet the needs of the population. The NHS began to become a landmark institution, respected for its coverage of all – including visitors from abroad who needed medical attention whilst they were here. It was particularly respected for its GP coverage and for arranging for hospital check-ups or admittance, which collectively covered the whole of the country – even isolated islands and hamlets.

A DIFFERENT DOGMA:

But there was still an inherent dogma amongst Treasury officials and their political heads that only a ruling class drawn from an aristocracy or well-heeled business professionals had the know-how to run the country. But somehow this aberration had slipped in.

It was true that many industries had been nationalised by the 1945 Labour Government. But these were commercial bodies, clapped out after the war and without investment in new technology. These needed Government cash to fatten them up to become competitive again. Conservative opposition was at the time largely cosmetic, designed to keep the class struggle burning in the breasts of their local activists.

Whilst the workforce in the newly nationalised industries may have had ideas that it allowed them to share control of management, the 1945 Government soon scotched that notion, and the existing management carried on almost as before.

Meanwhile, with every family in contact with their local GPs, the NHS became as integral to people’s lives as the local grocers’ shop. One supplied food, the other health – the difference being that one required payment for goods whilst the other came free.

AND A NEW ETHIC:

Changes in organisation, and the steady, if slow, improvement in hospital provision and employees’ working conditions, with shorter hours, better pay, holidays, pensions. etc., added to the moral uplift of serving the sick and needy.

The medics’ Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” began to pervade the entire fabric of NHS service. An exceptional example of this was the response by junior doctors in the mid-1960s to like-minded Canadian colleagues locked in struggle in the province of Saskatchewan. Local GPs were boycotting attempts by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government in the province to bring in a health care system similar to the UK’s NHS. Doctors from Britain moved into the province and helped to ensure that the new system wasn’t stillborn. The CCF government won, and now Canada’s health care system is much closer to ours than that in the USA.

By the 1960s/’70s, “Butskellism” had produced a balance in Parliament and elsewhere which allowed consensus management to emerge within the NHS. It found its best expression in the joint teams formed to work with NHS Estates on the design and building of new hospitals, making up for the loss caused by Treasury niggardliness. More facilities for training doctors, nurses and other staff were also provided.

However, by this time it was clear that the NHS was falling behind Europe. Not in the coverage of all its population, in which

Britain had a clear lead, but in the provision of health infrastructure and facilities – modern hospitals, convalescent homes and other after-acute-care treatment.

The Treasury and Exchequer’s response to criticism was to point to Government spending which was on a par with other countries – implying that our problem was one of staff productivity.

A BREAK IN THE CONSENSUS:

The philosophy of consensus and its practice of mutual working within the NHS broke down as a result of Barbara Castle’s attempt when Health Minister in the mid-1970s to introduce a new programme to bring less privileged areas of the Health Service up to a higher standard via a Resources Working Party. This meant taking out of the system the bed spaces used by consultants for their private patients.

Even in times of need, consultants had kept beds empty to meet anticipated private patient demand. In 1975 rank and file staff revolted and refused to service these beds at the new Charing Cross Hospital at Hammersmith. Barbara Castle recognised the cause of the problem, and used it to support getting pay beds out of the system.

Temporarily the strikers won, but the outraged private sector phalanx who were using NHS facilities for treating cash paying patients, or those from BUPA and other insurance companies, mobilised to defeat Castle. Callaghan, who had replaced Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, capitulated to the consultants. They could now place private patients wherever in NHS hospitals. And Barbara Castle was sacked.

THATCHER ON THE ATTACK:

Carlton Club type debates involving privatising consultants, Thatcher-minded politicians and BUPA prepared the ground for Thatcher’s campaign to Americanise Britain’s National Health Service – ignoring advice from Norman Fowler (her longest serving Health Secretary) to leave well alone. The system was working, and covered the entire population.

Thatcher followed simple grocer shop economics. She saw every pound not in her father’s till but spent by local authorities and governments on public welfare as an infringement of the principle that just as her father paid for all living expenses and welfare benefits out of the labour and enterprise of running his shop, so should every customer pay for their welfare out of their wages. This soon became lifted to a code of conduct which attributed all deficiencies in society to money spent on social welfare. If this expenditure ceased then all would be well with Britain – and soon with the world, when we joined the Thatcher/Reagan axis.

This was elevated to become a core strategy for privatising the NHS. It took the form of introducing managers from commercial companies, to break the “chummy” culture and end the improved consensus-working of NHS staff. This would be replaced by units of managers on fixed term contracts and quantitative goals to meet.

Financially, there was a need to increase the NHS budget because of technical improvements and a growing population with an increasing life expectancy. And as people aged, their demands on hospital beds increased. Thatcher’s answer was to transfer the problem to local authorities under the rubric of “Care in the Community”, without providing or ring fencing the necessary money.

Then a whole barrage of financial instruments were introduced into hospital budgeting to cover claims that hospitals were inefficiently run or too costly to manage. During the 1990s Inland Revenue valuers were instructed to add an additional six per cent to the rateable value of NHS buildings. They also had to assess land at market valuations based on maximum values.

Adding the Private Finance Initiative to all the Thatcher-style financial juggling, and then factoring in the costs of the paperwork for running an internal market between each section of the NHS, and the result were about £20 billion – almost a fifth of the annual cost of the NHS.

NEW LABOUR – AND CAMERON’S HEALTH & SOCIAL CARE BILL:

New Labour carried on with this process of privatising the NHS from its election in 1997 to its defeat by Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010. Now they, through the Health and Social Care Bill, which is now completing its passage through Parliament, are the final stages of breaking up the integrated health system into fragments suitable for capitalist concerns to acquire and operate as profit making enterprises.

Among the policies being put forward in the Bill is that of letting loose the “bug” of greed amongst GPs in former partnership arrangements., who will now find themselves part of business enterprises with the salaries of individual doctors in a particular surgery now going as a lump sum to a “principle” who will allocate as he/she sees fit to junior doctors, and then pocket the remainder.

Within this new “profit” environment GPs (who will be transferred from small practices into large consortiums) will have the strain of competing amongst themselves for position, as well as competing against other consortia fighting for patients to meet “bottom line” situations controlled by entrepreneurial managers and CEOs.

GOODBYE TO YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD GP:

The new structure will be going into place within the first phase of closing down Primary Care Trusts. A third of the NHS budget will be handed over to the new commissions which will control GPs, and this is scheduled to be completed by mid 2012. Preparations will be undertaken to have all GPs in their allotted consortiums by April 2013. Thus the neighbourhood GP service – the bedrock which collectively links patients with the common benefits of a unified National Health Service – comes to an end.

RESCUE PLAN:

To rescue the NHS from the privateers, we will have to pick up on the programme attempted by Aneurin Bevan and which Barbara Castle also took on board – ie, to end private beds in NHS hospitals, provide neighbourhood health centres (modelled on that launched in Peckham), and create a new Resources Working Party to provide a levelling up of all NHS facilities, thus transforming an “only go when you are sick” approach into a “keep healthy and cure sickness” service.

Thus, there should be:

• No financial juggling, such as Public Sector Dividend, or six per cent valuation upgrade
• No valuing of land at market rent levels but at permitted planning use
• No “engineering” of pensions to place a false burden on NHS books
• No private beds within the NHS – and no facilities for private practice by NHS staff.

There should be provision for:

• Recovery hospitals for patients discharged from acute or specialist hospitals but not yet fit for home nursing.
• Convalescent homes for patients requiring recuperative treatment.
• Neighbourhood nursing homes for long-term sickness.
• Care housing and homes, and day centres as appropriate to needs.
• The transfer to the National Debt of all Private Finance Initiative costs.

A review of the Peckham Experiment and its philosophy.

“Peckhams” have in-house facilities, such as swimming pool, gymnasium, sports facilities and wellbeing – as neighbourhood community centres which link people as neighbours, families, children, etc.

A SEA-CHANGE NEEDED:

Implementing all these suggestions requires a sea-change in English politics, which would embrace its patient population in its entirety.

Patients should elect a neighbourhood forum to provide patient intervention teams, to ensure that their neighbourhood GPs continue to provide street or village coverage. Forums from neighbourhoods should be elected to ensure that Primary Care Trusts continue and co-ordinate NHS facilities within their area. Where these have been disbanded, these neighbourhood forums should establish “shadow trusts”, to intervene to ensure the continuation of area health provision.

Crucial to the success of patients organised in such forums will be the support of NHS staff. These should move from being subservient employees of CEOs engaged in the privatisation of the service at the diktat of a Conservative Prime Minister to the establishment of a directly democratic structure in which each employee has an equal say and vote – a co-operative form of employee self-management.

THE SANCTION OF THE PEOPLE:

To bring about such changes we also need to gain the sanction of England’s people.

In 1948 93.1 per cent of the population registered as patients under the NHS. As the transcendental authority of England is its people (above a Parliament of divided political parties), a referendum should be held in each Parliamentary constituency to gain the approval of such a programme. This should then be put to a free vote in Parliament.

Thus voters, as patients, as neighbours and as people, could express their verdict.

ALAN SPENCE

http://www.keepournhspublic.com/index.php

two short pieces

1. IT’S WIN, WIN FOR SOME!

RUTH RICHARDSON looks at who’s making big money out of those privatisation deals

The departure of Emma Harrison, the Prime Minister’s former “family tsar”, amidst allegations of fraud, focused attention on the huge contracts being handed out to companies carrying out public works.

Emma Harrison’s firm A4E was responsible for implementing the now infamous “welfare-to-work” programme. The company headed by Emma and James Harrison earned around £11 million last year wholly from the provision of public services.

PRIVATE… BETTER?

The mindset that private profit-making firms perform better than the public sector in many areas is one that both New Labour and Conservative governments have adopted in recent years. Last year Oliver Letwin told a think tank that the public sector needed “fear and discipline” instilled into it.

Meanwhile, an article in the Observer last month focused on who were the big earners in five areas of public provision; welfare being one of them. Other areas were prisons, health, schools and higher education.

PRISONS:

The UK has a greater proportion of prisoners in private hands than anywhere else in the world. It will be no surprise to Clarion readers to learn that the firm G4S (formerly Group 4) leads the way, with its CEO, Nick Buckles, earning £1.4 million in 2010. Twelve prisons have been transferred to private hands in recent years, and a further nine are out to tender.

HEALTH:

The creeping privatisation of the health services has been the subject of a number of articles in the Clarion. The Observer article highlighted the transfer of Hinchinbrooke Hospital to a company called Circle Healthcare in February, making it the first private firm to deliver a full range of NHS hospital services. The deal was worth one billion pounds, and the company’s CEO, John Griffiths-Jones, took home £2.62 million in 2010.

EDUCATION:

In education, private firms routinely provide many services such as supply teachers, ICT, grounds maintenance and “enrichment courses”, often in music or the arts, where teachers lack the necessary expertise. Breckland Free School, opening in September, will be run by IES – a Swedish company. Parents are quickly realising that managing free schools needs a measure of professional input, and a number of companies are ready to jump aboard. One such company, Wey Education, is quoted as saying that it saw an opportunity created by “the deconstruction of the education function within local authorities”. Pearsons, publishers of the Financial Times also provides educational services including the exam board Edexel. Pearsons’ CEO, Marjorie Scardino, was paid a salary of £969,000 in 2010, plus a bonus of £1.6 million.

UNIVERSITIES:

In higher education, provision through the private sector is perceived as a very real threat. At present there are two private universities in the UK. One of them, BPP University College gained almost £2 million in Government loans. BPP is owned by an American company, Apollo Inc., and its CEO, Carl Lygo takes home a modest salary of £500,000. Meanwhile, our public universities have suffered an eighty per cent cut to teaching grants and have to look increasingly to the private sector for funding. Some academics fear that this may compromise their independence to run the courses they choose.

POLICE..??

At the beginning of March, the Guardian led with a worrying story that there were secret plans to privatise the police force. Already private security companies are taking on many duties once performed by the police. We await developments.

Of course Tory ideology says that private is good whilst public is bad. Is that because of principle or is it because it provides rich pickings for the “haves”, including the Government’s cronies? With private firms, of course, the bottom line is always profit. And never mind the quality. After all, where’s the profit in public service service provision?
RR

2.

This sporting life: THE OLYMPICS: A TARNISHED IMAGE?

When the Olympic Games were revived, towards the end of the 19th Century, the founders had a vision. The Olympics were to demonstrate that peace and fellowship could grow through sporting contests embracing athletes from across the globe.

So where did we go wrong? Why has nationalism, and big business, become embedded so deeply in the very soul of the movement?

It may well have started with the Berlin Olympics in the 1930s – which was staged as a showpiece for Nazi ideology. In 1948, in a war-battered London, the Games put on a very different face. They were labelled “the Austerity Olympics”. Once again, the original ideals of the movement was forced to the fore. Britain won few medals on that occasion – but that wasn’t the point. Those who flocked to the sporting events, or followed the occasion through newsreels, newspapers or the wireless, enjoyed every minute of it.

Now the Olympics are back in Britain again. We’re all being exhorted to support “TeamGB”. After all, it’s our patriotic duty. Sponsorships from inappropriate business corporations multiply – and the whole event will take place in conditions of top security. Demonstrations are to be banned, and precautions include talk of a possible missile intercepter.

A site in East London was chosen, on the grounds that it was an area of urban decay – and, it was claimed, the games would bring regeneration and prosperity to all. Never mind the fact that there was already a community there. The community fought back – but housing and local amenities that were seen as irrelevant were swept aside, to make way for the glitzy Olympics infrastructure.  425 tenants of a local housing co-op found their homes being compulsorarily purchased, and they were dispersed into alternative accomodation across London.

Just to share out the pickings, contracts and sponsorships have been dealt out to many who surely must have friends in high places. Otherwise why would the contract for printing tickets go to a company in the deep south of the USA? Don’t we have printshops of our own?

Other dubious sponsorships include those given to BP and Dow Chemicals. Dow Chemicals bought the firm Union Carbide in 2001 – the company responsible for a toxic gas leak at its plant in Bhopal, India, which led to massive contamination and the death of thousands. Whilst no-one is suggesting that Dow, the present company, was directly responsible, it still has a responsibility. As Amnesty International says “when Dow bought Union Carbide, it bought liability for the Bhopal disaster.”

Gimmicks such as the decision to have the Olympic torch carried across the country by a motley team drawn from across the country won’t save these tarnished games. Big business and politics have taken over, all neatly packaged in the Union Jack.

EDITORIAL COMMENT: NHS – the fightback continues!

On March 20th 2012, the House of Commons delivered the death blow to the National Health Service as we’ve known it since 1948.

This, of course, isn’t the end of the campaign. It mustn’t be. But as the Service is fragmented, and the private sector moves in as “willing providers”, resistance will no doubt become more localised. Unions will continue to fight for pay and conditions of their members – and hopefully for the welfare of the patients that their members care for.

And, perhaps, we need to ask ourselves why? Why, after such an unprecedented campaign of sustained opposition, both from those who work within the NHS and the general public, did the ConDem government insist on pushing ahead with a piece of legislation that they knew was so unpopular. Why did they even refuse to listen to the health professionals themselves? After all, Cameron has performed U-turns on other issues – as he did on his Bill to sell off the forests. So why not on the NHS? Why wasn’t he prepared to bow to the will of the people?

Probably, on this issue, he felt that there was too much at stake. When it came to the crunch, his government had much more riding on it. And he had the vested interests of the private “healthcare” industry breathing down his neck. Despite all the blather, it was in their interests that the legislation has been forced through.

LABOUR:

And, of course, we’ve faced decades of creeping privatisation already – ever since the bleak Thatcher years in fact. It’s to the shame of the “New Labour” government under Blair that little or nothing was done to reverse the damage to the fabric of the NHS caused by the Thatcher years. Indeed, to give one example, the encouragement of PFI only served to make matters worse.

To its credit, the Labour leadership did campaign against the Health Bill, and voted against it in Parliament (the Lib Dems, of course to their eternal shame, voted in favour, and no doubt will be held to account for their actions). Labour has also pledged to repeal the Act when it returns to power. It is up to us, all of us, to hold them to this pledge. It’s all too easy for weasel words to emerge from those we elect a few years down the line, to the effect that “it’s now too late”. Or “we now have to work with what we’ve got”. When Nye Bevan fought to create National Health Service for all, “free at the point of need” he faced battles. But he built something special – and we want it back.

THE LOCAL SCENE:

For us, we will, no doubt, be turning our attention to the fate of healthcare in Gloucestershire. It is difficult to predict at this stage where we’ll be when the new legislation comes into effect. There may be battles to save local health centres, or even hospitals. What will be the fate of small community hospitals such as Lydney or the Dilke, for example? And what of those who work within the NHS locally? What does the future hold for them? Will they continue to be employed directly by the NHS, or will they find themselves working for a private healthcare company, with all that this implies?

In practice, the new legislation is so full of ambiguities that it is difficult to foresee what will happen further down the road. The “worst case scenario” is that the NHS will become merely a supervisory body overseeing a ragbag collection of privately owned healthcare bodies who will (in their own different ways) be given the responsibility of looking after our health on the ground – while perhaps remaining as provider of odd services that the private sector can’t cream off. It’s a daunting thought.

Meanwhile, we still haven’t been given the opportunity to see the secret “Risk Register” on the impact of the legislation. Until we do, we’re entitled to envisage the worst.

For all these reasons, of course, it’s why the fight MUST go on.

The Budget:

“MILLIONS ARE BEING ASKED TO PAY MORE, SO THAT MILLIONAIRES CAN PAY LESS”

It was Ed Milliband who said it all in his budget speech on March 21. In order to lower the tax rate levied on the super rich from 50 to 45 per cent, those on the lower rungs of the ladder are to be squeezed even more than they are now.

Well, the money has to come from somewhere doesn’t it? And if the super rich are going in for tax avoidance on a massive scale, why not lower their tax rate? After all, if they’re not paying up, does it matter?

Well of course it matters. The Chancellor, George Osborne, has now revealed that he’s not only a Thatcherite at heart but one in practice as well.

HITTING THE PENSIONERS:

Many pensioners will be particularly affected by Osborne’s budget. Some 4.1 million of them will be worse off. And new pensioners will lose out even more. As Dot Gibson, general secretary of the National Pensioners Convention, said of the budget proposals, “it’s a classic case of smoke and mirrors… In reality there will be no extra money to raise Britain’s scandalously low state pension – just a different way of packaging the payment.”

“The Chancellor’s pledge to cut welfare payments by £10 billion over the next few years will also worry millions of pensioners who may think that their bus passes and winter fuel allowances might be under threat, and the long awaited social care White Paper is being delayed without any explanation, while around a million older people are struggling with a broken care system. The money is being given away in tax breaks for the richest in society…..Pensioners will feel bruised by his budget.”

But of course it’s been the Chancellor’s “gift aid” to the wealthy that really hit the headlines the day after the budget. It was that, that really revealed the true face of Cameron’s Toryism.

MODERN TIMES: the Dinosaur Column

Preparing for the “Sicko” society?

I don’t know how many folk out there actually watch the adverts on TV. Maybe they prefer just to blank them out, treat them as rather annoying moving wallpaper, or go off to make a cup of tea during the commercial breaks.

But those who have been paying attention may well have noticed the sudden increase in the number of adverts for private health insurance. I’m aware that for some time we’ve had to put up with those smugly cosy plugs for BUPA, but now a range of insurance companies are getting in on the act.

After the National Health Service came into being, back in 1948, private health insurance seemed to sink without trace. After all, we all paid national insurance as a matter of course, so why pay twice for our health treatment? So is this sudden resurrection of private health insurance a sign of the times? Getting ready for when the Health and Social Care legislation comes into effect? It’s a chilling thought, isn’t it?

Those who’ve watched Michael Moore’s film Sicko will have seen what happens in the USA where folk rely on private insurance to see them through bouts of ill health and sickness. Me, I’m one of the NHS generation of dinosaurs – and I’ve no intention of surrendering to the blandishments of the private health care industry.

branching out:

Since Group 4 merged with Securicor it has attempted to re-brand itself. It now calls itself G4S, and in recent years it has been busy bidding for any Government contracts that come its way – including Ofsted, for goodness sake.

But one contract that it gained didn’t work out quite so well. It was some time ago that it was signed on to provide the security at Halifax Airport, Nova Scotia, Canada.

As readers may have noticed, this Dinosaur is partial to the odd visit to Canada – and Nova Scotia in particular. On one such visit we flew in – only to discover that Group 4 were now in charge of airport security. It was like stepping into a Marx Brothers’ comedy film.

The security guards were all dressed in what looked like ill fitting Ruritanian uniforms, and they charged around in a state of disorganised chaos. Queues at the checkout lengthened, with passengers reduced to a state of bemused uncertainty. There was no panic, but, hey, this was Canada, after all..

The next time we flew in to Halifax, the Group 4 guards had vanished, and it was all back to normal.

The nature of capitalism – in Canada

Whilst we’re talking Canadian, I came across one news item about a stand-off between the US company Caterpillar and its workforce at the company’s plant in London, Ontario.

Caterpillar makes those giant earth moving machines, as well as a range of mining and construction machinery. They’re big, in more ways than one. In 2010, It took over the local firm EMD, and moved into Ontario.

At the time, Canada’s Tory Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, praised the takeover as an example of how his government was attracting foreign investment into the country. But now Caterpillar has sacked the entire workforce at its Canadian plant – after they refused to take a 50 per cent pay cut. Yes, 50 per cent – I kid you not! Not only that, but workers would lose their pension rights.

On New Year’s day, the workers were locked out, and then in February the company announced that it was closing the factory and moving to a non-union plant back in the USA.

The union involved. is the Canadian Auto Workers Union. Its members put up a brave fight to save their jobs and the factory – but faced with unacceptable demands from a predatory company, their jobs have gone, and the whole local economy will suffer as a result.

Incidentally, on an ironic note, it was in London, Ontario, that the Tolpuddle Martyrs chose to settle after they returned from their long years doing penal servitude in Australia. And they are remembered by the town that they chose to settle in. There is a monument there to their memory, as well as a co-op housing development and a trade union complex in the town, both named after them. Despite the machinations of US asset stripping companies like Caterpillar, this is the true face of trade unionism in Canada.

Dinosaur

The War (for Children’s Minds) by Stephen Law

{a review by C. Spiby for The Clarion}

Many might recall Marx’s declaration that – up to his age – philosophers had sought only to understand or as he put it ‘describe’ the world, but the point was ‘to change it.’ This might be the kernel of many an activist but it is a quality not exclusive to socialism.

Many times in The Clarion I have argued that the way to truly change society is through education. But, in our time, education is the realm primarily of children. And this is why it is there that the battleground for reason is being fought.

Today’s teenagers are the ‘war on terror’ generation. They are borne of a war built on an impossible, unachievable abstract waged by fundamentalist positions of varying zeal from both Muslim and Christian traditions, charged with a bonus shot of Zionism. As Richard Dawkins warned in ‘The God Delusion’, the minds of these children will form the foot-soldiers of tomorrows’ war. Be this, as in the case of Palestinian teenagers for example, martyrdom (as so tragically documented in James Miller’s film ‘Death in Gaza’, which saw him shot and killed by the Israeli Defence Force) or the attack on reason in US schools. There 96% of Americans claim to believe in God and their authorities have banned books such as 1984 as well as, in some cases, the barest mention of scientific evolution, favouring instead what is righteous and good as dictated by the Bible.

All this, however, is wrapped in a paradox: while faith and irrationality might be at the root of more conflict now than in any time previous in the last century and a half, there is equally a decline at least in the Christian tradition in church-going and the role of faith in state affairs. And some would have it, therefore, a decline in morality. But does that really follow?

Welcome then teenage drop-out come post-man turned philosophy professor, Stephen Law and his ‘The War for Children’s Minds’.

Although primarily concerned with the issue of faith, it is not faith alone which Law sees as the problem – unlike Dawkins’ or Hitchens works have been characterised (although they’re more about reason) – but authority. And it is this difference in perspective which explains why obvious rebukes of the idea that only religion is synonymous with moral conduct don’t appear until page 158 (with the citing of Fukuyama).

Law’s book ‘Makes a case for a particular kind of liberal moral education, an education rooted in philosophy, not authority.’ That is, getting pupils to think independently, building arguments through rational persuasion at most.

Blair’s New Labour were (in)famous in providing the blue print for the Tories to encourage more faith schooling in the UK. But Law builds a steady case against the notion that faith has a monopoly on moral education. Instead he offers a list of skills the student might cultivate as opposed instead of deference to a higher authority just because they say so or it is written (where, for example, it is ordained that homosexuals or women are not to be treated as equals). Law recommends students be taught to…

• Reveal and question underlying assumptions,
• Figure out the perhaps unforeseen consequences of a moral decision or point of view
• Spot and diagnose faulty reasoning
• Weigh up evidence fairly and impartially
• Make a point clearly and concisely
• Take turns in a debate, and listen attentively without interrupting,
• Argue without personalising a dispute,
• Look at issues from the point of view of others, and
• Question the appropriateness of, or the appropriateness of acting on, one’s own feelings.

These are admirable qualities we could probably all use. And like most good advice, it is obvious and easy but I’d wager if we really adopted them well, we might just make the citizens of a shared world worthy of and for each other. And that’s probably why it hasn’t been universally applied, as it is not in the interests of the quiet authoritarians pulling the strings. Law reminds us that modern education only fulfils half its original intent – not to merely intellectualise – but also create good citizens. This just happens to be a view shared by those in favour of more authoritarian approaches; Law just disagrees on how that is achieved. And he offers a convincing case.

Law is concerned with many things, including the misunderstanding of Kant and the Enlightenment. He manages to stay just on the interesting side of argumentative pedantry but his simple, yet philosophical approach convincingly breaks down all the arguments of the authoritarians.

One problem is, of course, that authoritarians will never recognise themselves as such. Another is that they will misrepresent the liberal approach. But at Law points out ‘To say “You must judge what is right and wrong” is not to say “You must judge on a wholly shallow, materialistic, self-serving basis”.’ And yet this is the familiar argument against liberal education. Law refutes the claims that liberalism is relativism and encourages anarchy in the classroom. Indeed, how could that possibly deliver a structured approach to thinking? Law rejects authority which dictates what is to be believed, rather than instilling the means to think for oneself.

An oddity of many philosophic debates (as a visit to the Tintern Philosophy Circle (each 3rd Tuesday in the month at the Rose and Crown 7.30pm) will often testify), is that it isn’t long before the topic of Nazis turn up. And Law’s book is no exception. I guess this is because the Nazis are such a milestone in amoral conduct they off a good example of how supposedly rational beliefs become policies that can carry a whole country into mass extermination (and by, um, ‘authority’ no less).

Here Law rightly draws on Milgram’s 1950’s psychological tests which sought to understand how Nazi concentration camp guards qualified their actions by claiming ‘they were only following orders’ and – so Milgram thought – to prove that it could never happen in the USA. Instead, Milgram found that actually ‘65% of ordinary American citizens will electrocute another human being to death if told to so by a white-coated authority-figure’. Law argues that it is only, as Kant says, through ‘the courage to use one’s own reason’ we might question such authority.

In fact, from a socialist perspective, our history is rich with those who questioned the established authority and challenged them in order to change the world for better. What is somewhat lacking here though is that which Marx set out – the means to change the status quo. At the risk of sounding like one endorses Pol Pot’s Year Zero: revolutionary action – in this case the means to ignite Enlightenment for modernity.

A liberal approach to character education won’t emerge of itself. It needs to be policy won by evidential argument, or if not grown organically by educationalists themselves. But I say what better place to start, while we wait for policy-makers to catch up, than in the home?

For his part, Law suggests some training for specialised teachers. After building such a convincing case, this solution seems rather lightweight.

In his defence, however, Law does cite cases where philosophy in schools has not only drastically improved critical thinking skills and reasoning, but there’s also evidence of side-benefits too both in general educational improvement, as well as better behaviour and attitudes, particularly on moral issues like, say, bullying.

So my major political conundrum (the myth of the rational voter) isn’t yet solved, but at least the debate as to how to positively influence change has begun with this highly recommended, mindful book. Buy it, read it and then buy a copy for the Head of your local school.

REPORT:Going forth into the Wilderness – to occupy *UPDATED*

The Wilderness Centre, up in the Forest near Plump Hill is known and loved by many folk in the Forest, and by the schools and other groups who have visited.

It has been administered, on behalf of the community by the Gloucestershire County Council – until the decision was taken to close it as part of the ongoing cuts.

But in January a group have occupied the centre, with the intention of running this community asset as it should be run. And Mark Hawthorn, leader of the County Council was not happy at this development..

According to a statement issued by those in occupation at the centre, the volunteers “have moved in to serve as caretakers and run it on a voluntary basis.

“We wish to work with the Friends of the Wilderness Centre and Gloucestershire councils to keep the centre open for the benefit of the local community and involve them in the process of deciding what the future of the centre should be.

“We believe there is an urgent need now more than ever to keep community hubs and educational spaces open so people can come together to learn skills and share ideas. These spaces empower and enable communities collectively to forge a truly sustainable economy and local resilience for for the times ahead.

“This closure is an especially big blow to local young people as it is depriving them of a means to learn about their ecological environment, learn skills to provide employment, and is taking away their heritage.

“We follow in the footsteps of the HOOF campaign whose efforts led to the protection of the forest for future generations. “

HOSTILE:

The response from Councillor Mark Hawthorne was hostile. He declared that the centre’s occupants were trespassing. He threatened legal action to evict them – and complained of the cost to the County of enforcing such action and introducing security measures.

“…Council Tax payers will have to foot the bill for any additional security that is needed and for hefty legal costs if we have to go through the courts to get them to leave the site,” he said.

We have news for Mark Hawthorne. His Council are the custodians of a community asset which it is supposed to administer on behalf of the people of the Forest and others who may care to use it. By closing down the centre in the first place, the County Council are in abuse of their role as custodians.

If Hawthorne is concerned about the costs involved in taking action against those occupying the centre, the answer is simple. Don’t take action. Work with those at the centre, and let them know that the Council is on their side.

Or does he have other plans for this very special site?

Ironically, Hawthorne seems to be out of step with his party leader here. The occupation of the Wilderness Centre is surely in tune with Cameron’s espousal of the “big society” – or have we got it all wrong?

As we go to press, the situation at the centre remains fluid. The threat of eviction remains, whilst those occupying the centre press ahead with ideas to involve the community in the future of the Wilderness. This could be an opportunity – if it’s not strangled by the intransigence of the County Council.

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT: MARCH 2012

SAVING THE WILDERNESS

The Wilderness Centre at Plump Hill near Mitcheldean is special. It’s special to our environment, and to the thousands who’ve visited it over the years and used its services.

Formerly the grounds of a country estate, the Wilderness was opened under the auspices of the Gloucestershire Youth Service back in 1969, to operate as a field studies centre. And for over forty years it was open to visiting school parties, community groups and exchange visits by those from abroad.

It was an ideal spot – and not just for the scenery alone! It includes woodland and meadow land and buildings for study and teaching. For those concerned with our environment, and the interaction of nature with our own footfall on the land we inhabit, it is indeed special.

COUNTY COUNCIL:

The Gloucestershire County Council has been the custodian of this very important site. Maybe it’s been important to us – but to those in County Hall it has been merely a site, with no appreciation of its special significance.

In August last year, following the Council’s round of swingeing budget cuts which affected both the library service and county youth service in particular, the Wilderness Centre was closed down.

That, it seemed, was that. The County Council had achieved a fait accompli. But then, in January 2012, the Wilderness was once more in the news. A group calling themselves “Occupy the Wilderness” moved into the

The aim was to restore the Wilderness, through direct action, to its original purpose – that of providing a centre for the benefit of the community and those who appreciated our natural surroundings, and who could learn from them.

“ILLEGAL”:

The response by Council chiefs was immediate. They declared that the action was “illegal”. Security guards were called in to patrol the perimeter, and Mark Hawthorne (leader of the County Council) bemoaned the “cost to Council Tax payers” of this security and of taking legal action.

On Monday, March 5th, those who had taken part in the occupation appeared in Gloucester County Court on charges of trespass. The hearing lasted two days, and the defendants were found guilty.

But the occupation has continued, and those occupying the Wilderness Centre have continued to try to put their ideals into action.

A BUY-OUT?

What the County Council initially wanted to do with the Wilderness is not known. But it has now agreed to talk to the “Friends of the Wilderness” about selling the site, who aim to restore it as a field study centre. But they have been set a target of raising one million pounds, to cover the purchase of the site from the County Council and the start-up costs to get the centre up and running again.

INTERVENTION;

The latest development in the Wilderness saga has been an intervention by a group of academics, who have put their names to a letter given front page coverage in the Review on March 14th. To quote the Review, those who signed up to the letter “slammed Gloucestershire County Council’s closure of the Wilderness Centre outdoor learning centre…”

The letter pointed out that it was twenty years ago this year that the Rio Earth Summit took place, calling for us “to think global, act local” to sustain our environment.

The signatories to the letter asked the question, “Does an environmental/outdoor education centre have a role to play…?” Their answer was “We think so. And we write to you from different parts of the world to express our concern and opposition to the decision to close down and sell the Wilderness Centre at Mitcheldean.”

Judging by his response, Councillor Mark Hawthorne simply doesn’t get it. But we do. And the fight to save the Wilderness continues.

READERS’ COMMENTS: Did we go wrong? The campaign to keep Gloucestershire’s NHS public

Carl Spiby’s article (Clarion number 96) is very disappointing, considering that the campaign to halt the wholesale transfer of 3,000 staff out of the NHS into a private company (Gloucestershire Care Services) is ongoing.

It is doubly disappointing because Carl is supposed to be a member of of the Forest of Dean Against the Cuts group who have spearheaded this campaign. It’s a bit like having the postmortem conducted by a member of the family before the patient is dead.

Carl starts by saying that the campaign has failed and that we must learn where we went wrong. Well, considering the small number of active members of this group, I consider that we have achieved a lot in such a small amount of time, and it would be more productive to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positives.

(Is this a feature of the Hard Left – always looking on the dark side of life?)

Such campaigns as this need to have modest objectives in order to maintain the sanity of the protagonists. Did Carl really expect that presenting a petition to Harper and arguing with him at the time would persuade him to abandon the Health & Social care Bill and instruct the PCT to abandon plans to transfer all NHS community services to a private company? This is what the petition asked.

This suggests to me a scale of naivety which is hard to comprehend.

The petition was very successful in directly informing well over 2,000 people in the Forest of the details of what was being proposed. And therefpre it was a vital part of raising awareness which is the first objective of any such campaign.

As for Carl’s silly conclusion that we were late in starting the campaign, we were campaigning long before he came along. And, really, it’s the outcome that matters.

It is quite conceivable that we could succeed in the legal challenge that the PCT acted illegally in handing over a £100 million contract without following the proper procedures. And then we can truly rejoice, rather than arguing how we could have had a better campaign.

PETE STANWAY (member of the Forest of Dean Against the Cuts, but written in a personal capacity).

RIGHT TO REPLY

(author of said article responds to PS’s letter)…

Pete Stanway’s response is to my article is unfortunate, but welcome. I will not, however, rise to the points which are personally-directed – ill-founded as they are – I suspect they are of no interest to readers of The Clarion. But in the interests of accuracy on some important details, I feel, I will exercise my right to reply.

First though, may I repeat that the SOSAgain campaign is indeed creditable and that I sought to include many of its gains in my article. Also I never stated the FoD Against the Cuts had folded or implied anything like that about the SOSAgain campaign either.

But when Pete says he prefers not to consider the reality of the situation and instead “eliminate the negative”, I would counter that it is not for us to pick and choose the terms of the debate.

Pete will recall that the root of the article’s argument lay with a question asked by a member of the public at our own public meeting. In that question was all the worry and desperation of why hadn’t something been done before? And that is what I sought to answer.

The reality is that it was under New Labour’s 2008 document ‘NHS Next Stage Review: Our vision for primary and community care’ (published by the Department of Health), PCT’s were given the prod – not as Government policy – but as ‘guidance’ expected to be taken, that the decision on how to deliver local health services should be made locally by PCT’s (the responsible statutory authority, as overseen by the Strategic Health Authority).

Wrapped up in the follow-on document – the 2009 Department of Health ‘Transforming Community Services: Enabling new patterns of provision’ – which is still under Labour’s tenure in government you will notice – is the next death-knell, pushing the ‘guidance’ now as ‘best practice’ with the split between service provider and commissioner of services now seemingly a given among policy-makers as the means to build local health services for the future. Our campaign should have been in full swing come 2008; by 2009 it still could have pushed the PCT in a different direction.

Indeed, even GCS’s own Business Plan (of 2011) admits that staff were ‘unanimously against’ the changes, but by this point the guidance had been endorsed by the PCT and had become local policy consistent with the national operating framework which had been in place from 2008 onward.

Cited in the same plan is the revealing wisdom that successive guidance reinforced these issues: ‘The Department of Health’s Transforming Community Services programme…did not change them. The County Council’s Cabinet and the Trust’s Board endorsed the plan for integration in July 2010.’

Meanwhile staff themselves outlined their opposition to a social enterprise, (in a letter to the NHSG PCT  Board of 14th October 2010) with ‘the preferred option of remaining within the NHS and therefore are proposing a vertical integration with 2gether NHS Foundation Trust.’ The fact that this avenue has failed to materialise as a creditable alternative suggests that the PCT’s decision to adopt New Labour’s guidance is irreversible.

A legal challenge which can prove that THAT avenue was not fully explored could be fruitful but on what basis it might be made, I do not know. Certainly the current case presented by our friends in Stroud cannot insist 2gether submit a tender. Besides, it also assumes that 2gether NHS Foundation Trust themselves wish to opt to take-over these services, which I am not entirely sure – as a separate body already  – they will be able to do, especially since their focus is in mental health provision. So that avenue remains suspiciously quiet, and I certainly haven’t see any literature or letters from my fellow campaigners (and do not remember supporting that avenue at any of the meetings I attended) to support that action.

It is exactly these changes, however, which are being replicated and worsened by the Tories in their dreadful NHS reform bill.

Meanwhile we distracting ourselves with the semantics of a local issue when the decision to push the service provider/commissioning split was made by a previous government some four years prior is – in my mind – fighting the wrong battle.

The national issue is still in the debate stage (in the House of Lords). As I see it we are given a second-chance to oppose the changes, and this time bodies like the BMA and RCN are definitely on board. So, let’s learn from the mistakes of the local campaign and focus now on saving the NHS for us all.

While I support debate in The Clarion on this issue, I’d rather readers wrote against the national NHS reform bill to the Lords and their MP. See the 48degrees for tips for starters. I hope on that alone Pete and I might be of one mind.

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE COMMENT:

The Stroud Against the Cuts case settled with Gloucestershire NHS PCT out-of-court. Advertising for ‘Expressions of Interest’ were immediately posted by the PCT but the Forest and Stroud groups remain committed to keeping local NHS services public.

DOUBLE-TAKE: Survivors (double take pt.2)

Facing the fears of humanity: SURVIVORS reviewed by ALISTAIR GRAHAM

Unlike Carl, I’ve long been a fan of science fiction – though, like others of my ilk, I’ve often thought that, as a genre, it’s a misnomer. Perhaps “speculative fiction” might be a more accurate name?

For a start “science fiction” as a brand name is too sprawling, and often it’s difficult to find any connecting threads that bind the whole concept together. The kind of works that Carl cites could possibly be described as “what if” fiction, examining possibilities in an often scary and definitely uncertain world.

In Survivors the devastating plague that sweeps across the world seems to have some mysterious eastern, possibly Chinese, source. But be that as it may, as law and order and any vestiges of government break down, the problems of personal survival are soon very real for the few thousand people who are left alive. Notions of re-building some semblance of society only emerge slowly out of this chaos.

Gradually the scattered remnants of humanity come together in groups and react to the global catastrophe in different ways. Early scavenging bands are short lived – to be replaced by those who seek survival through self sufficient communal groups – or, more menacing, paramilitary bodies who see the need for discipline, order, and the enforcement of their own notion of a future society.

Is this the way it would be, with the complete breakdown of central government and a much reduced, fragmented population? As a hypothesis I find it credible – and I know which alternative I would seek out.

It’s all told through human stories involving a central core of characters seeking to set up a communal base where they can survive and grow. It’s a shifting, precarious, two steps forward, one step back sort of progress. The problems of starting from scratch are explored, along with the pressures of maintaining group solidarity amongst the surviving flotsam and jetsam of humanity. The question of “leadership” is explored. One character remarks “there will always be leaders and those who are led” (really? why?), even it seems when it comes to collective decision making. In one episode, two rival claimants, Greg and Charles face up to each other like rutting stags, to see who will be the Alpha Male in their re-established community.

But it’s Jimmy Garland, adventurer and one-time Lord of the Manor, who is the archetypal Alpha Male. He carries on a one-man guerilla war against a paramilitary outfit that’s taken over his family estate, until he emerges triumphant to carry on his feudal role, before carrying off Abby Grant on a mission to find her son at the end of Series One.

Garland is an anachronism, a character out of a John Buchan novel. But other leadership roles are solidly middle class, whilst working class types are either subordinate, buffoons or just comic. Which is a pity, as it grates somewhat on what otherwise is a thought-provoking, absorbing idea.

As the story progresses, our gallant band move out from their west country haven, heading north and meeting further challenges on the way (which allows us to experience other communities with varieties of problems and responses). Finally, Greg goes walkabout, leaving Jenny more or less in the lurch.

I found the conclusion not too satisfactory. It was almost as if the decision was made to wrap the whole story-line up as quickly as possible, and bring the series to an end. There is a long drawn out “search for Greg”, before our protagonists finally reach a hydro-electric plant in the highlands of Scotland, manage to restore power through the national grid – and thus usher in a new dawn for humanity.

“Simples” – as they say these days. But with so much left unanswered!

ALISTAIR GRAHAM

Survivors intro

DOUBLE-TAKE: Survivors (double take pt.1)

I am not a fan of sci-fi: never have been and probably never will be. Or so I thought.

Like every other boy of the 1970’s I loved love ‘Star Wars’ but it wasn’t until the early 80’s with the BBC’s adaptation of ‘The Day of theTriffids’, and then ‘Threads’ did a certain breed sci-fi come to affect my whole outlook on life. Frankly, at the time I thought we were doomed. Borne of these are the beginnings of a political awakening that took another decade to bear fruit.

Both were imaginings of terrible fictions. ‘Threads’ seemed all too real and hypothesized nuclear Armageddon, whereas the BBC’s updating of the John Wyndham’s novel presented a different side to social destruction –giant, man-killing plant aliens. The genre was known as post-apocalyptic, and is an awkward addendum to sci-fi genre. They were fictions based on supposedly scientific possibilities. Indeed, ‘Threads’ was the first mass understanding of the nuclear winter hypothesis which was a debate still raging at the time – making even surviving a nuclear holocaust so terrible as to warrant questioning the point of living.

But I was slightly too young to remember the silent killer at work in the BBC’s 1970’s post-apocalyptic series ‘Survivors’.

This time it was an invisible means of destruction: disease. Watching the 70’s series on DVD today, I can see now that had I been just a bit older when it aired, it would have marked me as indelibly as ‘Threads’ would later in the 80’s.

Written by TV sci-fi supremo Terry Nation (who also gave us Blake’s 7 and many a Dr. Who storyline) it supposes the very real threat of a deadly epidemic and the social decay and terrible anarchy that arises out of the entire destruction of the state. These are topics I have written about before in The Clarion with my review of ‘The Death of Grass’ (by John Christopher) and to a degree in my explorations of modern utopian writing (all share communes and different social codes among their defining features). Nation, however, was at pains to distance his new series from his sci-fi work stating that “Survivors has its roots in the future, as it were, but it’s not science-fiction. It’s not going into the realms of the impossible; it’s skating very close to the possible,” which I guess is why the series still holds my interest, despite Nation’s other portfolio.

Indeed, the Radio Times write-up for ‘Survivors’ (it was shown on BBC1 over 3 series from 1975) cites a line from the show which sums up perfectly its preoccupation: “Incredible, isn’t it? We are of the generation that landed a man on the moon and the best we can do is talk of making tools from stone.”

‘Survivors’ is at its best when it questions our assumptions about how stable our society really is. How civil we might truly be under great duress, and what happens when we peel away the froth of our consumerist lives? It pokes around in moral dilemmas not usually broadcast in BBC dramas at 8pm on a Wednesday night. Today or in the 70’s.

Jenny, Abby & Greg (L to R). The face Jenny is pulling is because they’ve just found the body of a man hanged for looting a supermarket.

Lucy Fleming is the likeable constant, but where as heroine ofseries one (Carolyn Seymour as Abby Grant) is admirably driven she remains fairly impenetrable and one dimensional. What is to be commended, particularly for the age – as this still happens too infrequently today – is that the producers accepted a female as the lead character in what was on the face of it an adventure series. Granted, ‘Charlie’s Angels’ was also around at the same time, but they were impeccably hair-sprayed icons drawn by men of what women heroes ought to be like (and with a male for their boss, no less). Even ‘Wonderwoman’ was busty and pouted silky lip-gloss. By contrast Abby Grant crops her hair as she sets out on the road into a post-apocalyptic British countryside, her dead husband sprayed across the lounge sofa.

The camera follows Abby in what could easily have turned outto be classic Twilight Zone territory (“Oh God, please don’t let me be the only one.”) only to reveal to the audience the parallel story of Jenny Richards (Fleming) and then separately again the incredibly annoying Jackanory-esque tramp-comes-good storyline of Tom Price (played in a ridiculously Dickensian turn by Talfryn Thomas). But once modern viewers adjust their grins at the tragic fashion and 70’s BBC acting, the strength of the stories and other characters comes to the fore.

My favourite, for example is that of super-bitch Anne Tranter and Vic who she leaves for dead in a quarry once she realises he cannot supply her with riches now that he’s tragically crippled by an accident. Then there’s the poetic child-killer in series two and capital punishment episode in series one, both of which feel like Amnesty International had a hand in the writing.

Of course, one of the recurring themes is the nature of community and the role of leadership, be it within our ragtag group or across the other surviving communities and bandits the characters stumble across. Alongside this is the pressure that “Our civilisation had the technology to land a man on the moon, but as individuals we don’t even have the skill to makean iron spearhead”. The realisation that scavenging will only last so long comes to the fore and without a sign of a state forming any time soon, there’sa quick return to self-sufficient agriculture, with all its pitfalls and trials. This is not ‘The Good Life’.

Upon completing production of the pilot episode, contracts were drawn up in January 1974 and the show commissioned around the theme: ‘Bubonic plagues sweeps the world, killing all but a handful of people who escape to the country with absolutely nothing and who start civilisation again from scratch.’ But the response to Nation’s series was mixed.

The Times was expecting classic sci-fi in the Dr. Who mould from Nation and was therefore rightly disappointed. The Guardian for its part was just underwhelmed (‘a perfectly passable pastime’). The Daily Mail, however,got it on the nail when it compared its greatest strength to HG Wells’ War ofthe Worlds in which ‘extraordinary events are set in actual, small-scale landscapes’ – which is why the work reminded me of ‘The Death of Grass’ (and toa degree, John Wyndham’s ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’) – all of which seem set in a comfy version of the British countryside which we’ve come to love through thelikes of Betjemen, the Hovis ad or ‘All Creatures Great and Small’. And that is why so much of it is so simple yet effective.

Some of this is owed to the ‘feel’ of the work. While the opening title theme is infectious (ahem) and the titles sequence explains all we need to know about the origin and spread of the disease, it is interesting to note that it wasn’t a clever directorial instruction to omit incidental music, but a BBC strike, which lead to a very tight production schedule and hence no budget or time for music. This probably inadvertently adds much to the silence of dead Britain. It obviously works, because there’s still no incidental music by the end of the final third series.

It is also with some interest then that I discovered that much of the farm the group settles in during series two is not far from Monmouth. In fact, there’s quite a local link. Series one saw shoots in Evesham, the Pitville Circus in Cheltenham, various locations around Ross-on-Wye, Llanarth Court in Monmouth but was mostly shot in Herefordshire’s Hampton Court. By series two Callow Hill Farm near Monmouth came the setting for the fixed commune.

Alan W. Turner’s biography of Nation lays the departure of the shows’ creator to a split with co-writer Jack Ronder. The two had differences over the series’ direction and once Nation had also fallen out with the producer, Nation withdrew from his own project altogether. Besides, by this point Brian Clemens, who Nation had worked with on shows like ‘The Avengers’, filed court proceedings stipulating ‘Survivors’ was his idea in the first place’. The project seemed diseased on every level.

Somehow it survived. A second series was commissioned and Nation penned a novelisation of his version of the story – now a collectors’ item. For TV, Series two (1976) sees the departure of Abby Grant and a change of setting and I think it is all the better for it. It does suffer from the problem in TV series where one remarkable thing has to happen after another for fear of losing audience interest (but that could also be said of ‘The Archers’, albeit on a slightly smaller scale and perhaps less deadly). This sadly misses the point, of course, that ordinary post-apocalyptic life had itself WAS extraordinary to us viewers watching from the lap of technological luxury and leisure.

Series three took the show to its conclusion (1977). It still had the essence of what Turner commented was Nation’s premise, a “western, the struggle against nature and the attempt to establish a morality in a lawless land.” But now it was more about adventure than character and smaller domestic struggles. Eventually, the search for engineer Greg Preston becomes more than annoying and dampens the effect of the ‘Survivors’ as a whole.

Of course ‘Survivors’ received the inevitable modern BBC remake. And like many updates it revels in sensation, where remarkable things have to be so exciting and bombastic as to be inane. Zombie-apocalypse movies and video games are now ten a penny and with them, the danger of something as benign as a disease just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In many ways, however, the real world is more frightening. Remember BSE, driving past foot-and-mouths bonfires, bird-flu? And the impending influenza epidemic we’re due?

Yes, ‘Survivors’ is old-fashioned. But it is a unique piece of British TV history, trapped in time in this vast DVD box set.

SOURCES: ‘Survivors’ the complete series on DVD; ‘The ManWho Invented the Daleks: the strange worlds of Terry Nation’ by A. W. Turner(Aurum Press, 2011); http://survivors-mad-dog.org.uk/

So long, Bill: A tribute to Bill Punt

Clarion Editor-in-chief, Alistair Graham, leads the tribute to the socialist, trade unioninst, champion of the pensioners’ cause – and long time Clarion friend of the Clarion.

There must be many folk who missed Bill Punt when he left the Forest some six years at the age of 90. And many folk will have been sorry to hear of his death at the end of last year.

He made many friends – and some enemies, too, as he never suffered fools gladly (as the saying goes). But he was passionate in his beliefs, warm-hearted, and devoted to his family.

Bill was an active member of the TGWU, ever since his days as a tram driver on the streets of London just after the war. He served on the union committee at the New Cross tram depot and then went on to serve on the buses, until in 1961 he became a full-time trade union official at the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market where he worked until retirement in the early 1980s.

FIGHTING FOR PENSIONERS:

Bill and his wife Lou chose to retire to the Forest, setting up home first in Aylburton and later in Lydney. One of his first moves was to set up a branch of the British Pensioners’ Trade Union Action Association (as it was then called) in the Lydney area – a non-party political organisation dedicated to campaigning for the rights of pensioners. It became a thorn in the side of Paul Marland, then the Forest’s Tory MP – particularly during the campaign against VAT on fuel payments.

LOYALTY TO LABOUR:

Despite implacable opposition to the Blairite policies of the “New Labour” Government, Bill always refused to leave the Labour Party. He saw it as his party, hi-jacked by those who sought to distort or reverse its basic principles. It was this rebellious, stubborn streak which endeared him to some – whilst irritating others!

Bill worked tirelessly through the Labour Party for the election of Diana Organ, who finally beat Paul Marland to become MP for the Forest in 1997. Her election must have owed something to the work of Bill and his fellow pensioners.

Many will remember how he organised trips down to Tolpuddle, to the “Levellers’ Day” events in Burford, or to pensioners’ rallies in London – and how he mobilised us all. It was difficult to say no to Bill!

DISILLUSION:

His disillusion with the Labour hierarchy began in 1997, with the “re-branding” of the Party, the dropping of “Clause 4″ from the constitution, and the election of the Blair Government. He saw it as a betrayal of much of what he had he had fought for, for so many years. For Bill, the song “Things Will Only Get Better” was a mockery, and he became a bitter critic of the Government’s policies.

His views were expressed in a piece that he wrote for the Clarion in 2005, shortly before he left us:

“My party right or wrong? Castration of the trade unions? Who could ask for more!

“When will we return to the movement’s maxim, organise, educate and agitate, instead of acting merely as electioneering fodder and trailing behind the dictats of leadership like castrated poodles?”

Bill was a firm supporter of the Clarion and was a member of its editorial group from the very beginning, in 1996. His hard hitting articles and reports – often laced with his own brand of humour – became a familiar part of the paper. And he continued to contribute for some time after he moved to Kent.

He resigned as secretary of the Lydney pensioners’ group in 2001. His wife and loyal partner, Lou, died in the same year.

After living in the Forest for over twenty years, Bill had become part of its very fabric. But he had been born and bred in Bermondsey and as a youth worked in the local Cross & Blackwell factory, before being called up for service in the Army during the last war. Shortly after being sent to Africa, he was taken prisoner, and spent some years in prison camps before escaping during the chaos that followed the Allied advance after the D-Day landings.

He and a mate hid by day and travelled westward by night, avoiding any entanglement with the retreating Germans – until they discovered that for several days they had been escaping through British held territory. “It was then we thought it was time to give ourselves up,” said Bill.

Just one of the anecdotes of a full life that Bill liked to tell us!

ALISTAIR GRAHAM

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ALICE BATES:

We were also sorry to hear of the death of Alice Bates, a long-time subscriber to the Clarion, one-time editor of  the Pensioner magazine, and an active campaigner in the pensioners’ movement in Manchester.

As her daughter Sylvia wrote, “she was a positive and cheerful person to the end.”