| (25/04/12) "The message from this conference must be: 'We may have lost the battle, but we have not lost the war'" on the Health and Social Care Act, service group executive speaker Mary Locke told UNISON health delegates in Brighton this morning. "We need to make sure that government looks back on getting the Health and Social Care Bill passed as the easy part." Looking back on the 18 months of UNISON-led campaigning since the government's white paper "appeared out of thin air", Ms Lock recalled: "We made the NHS toxic all over again for the Tories. "No one will believe that airbrushed poster of David Cameron saying the NHS is safe in is hands ... because he is a liar, liar, liar!" Moving a composite motion on the new Act and privatisation, Maddy Nettleship of Gateshead health branch declared: "We, together with our local communities, will defend NHS. "The opposition coalition built up as Bill went through Parliament will not go away." And she noted that attacks on terms and conditions by local NHS trusts and attempt to argue for local pay bargaining “benefit no-one except the private vultures circling our NHS." Examining the services that private 'any qualified providers' are already looking at in just one trust, Pat Davies of the PT 'B' sector committee noted that, "again, this government is targeting most vulnerable groups in society with AQP." But there is an alternative, as Roger Nettleship of South Tyneside health noted. Although the prime minister had "thrown a grenade into the NHS" to fragment it and break it, UNISON knows that "health care is not a commodity, it is a need that needs to be provided for." Conference agreed and voted to continue and intensify the Our NHS Our Future campaign, working with other organisations and pushing the case that there is an alternative. |