Andy Worthington's Blog, page 153

Save Lewisham Hospital: Last Chance to Respond to Consultation – and Vigil on Thursday

For Lewisham residents, and residents of any other boroughs in south east London who are concerned about the future of the NHS, Thursday December 13, 2012 — tomorrow, as I write this — is a very important day. By midnight tomorrow, anyone wishing to respond officially to the disgraceful proposals to shut Lewisham Hospital’s A&E Department needs to have submitted their responses. And before that deadline, between 4 pm and 7 pm, there will be a torchlit vigil outside Lewisham Hospital, which everyone is encouraged to attend!

It is too late to post your response, but you can still email your responses, although the best way to respond by far is to fill in the response on the website of the Special Administrator appointed by the government to deal with the debt-ridden South London Hospital Trust, based in Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley, which is largely in debt because of outrageous PFI deals. To help you, the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign has provided a step-by-step guide, and Dr. Louise Irvine, a local GP who has campaigning tirelessly against the proposals, has also provided a useful guide here.

Please do this now, if you haven’t already! Now!

The Special Administrator, Matthew Kershaw, appointed in summer by health secretary Andrew Lansley (before he was sacked by David Cameron), responded to the SLHT’s problems by proposing that it should be broken up, and that Lewisham Hospital — not part of the SLHT, and not in debt — should have its A&E Department closed down as part of a merger with Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, many long miles away from Lewisham (and part of the troubled SLHT).

Queen Elizabeth Hospital is already catering for two boroughs, Greenwich and Bexley (after A&E services were shut down in Sidcup), and it would then be the only A&E Department for the 750,000 people in three London boroughs — Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley.

A knock-on effect closing A&E, and replacing it with an “Urgent Care Centre,” which cannot deal with emergencies, is the loss of all acute services, which largely rely on A&E to provide them with admissions. Because of this, the plans also involve a proposal to downgrade maternity services, so that only straightforward births can take place in Lewisham, where, just to reiterate, there will be no facilities for dealing with emergencies. Lewisham Hospital would soon become a ghost, and this can also be grasped from the Special Administrator’s proposal to sell off 60 percent of Lewisham Hospital’s buildings, and to convert most of the rest into a centre for non-urgent elective surgery; in other words, a small private hospital.

As I have been explaining since these plans were first announced, on October 29, this is unfair on the people of Lewisham, who need their own fully functioning hospital, with its own fully functioning A&E Department — as do all the London boroughs — and the proposals have only come about because Matthew Kershaw, and the other senior NHS personnel advising him, have refused to argue for this. They claim that they are making decisions designed to ensure that only the best standards of care are available throughout south east London, but their decisions are dictated solely by the drive to save money, and not on what is actually needed.

If seriously ill people in Lewisham do not die in a rush-hour traffic jam if these proposals go ahead, they will end up overwhelming the A&E staff in Woolwich, and also at King’s and St. Thomas’s, where many will end up. Similarly, there is no spare capacity anywhere for any of the 4,400 births a year in Lewisham that might involve complications, and, especially, no explanation is provided for what happens when a supposedly straightforward birth unexpectedly turns into an emergency.

Many of us involved in this campaign believe that the time frame provided in the legislation for dealing with bankrupt trusts (which is being used for the first time) is insultingly short (just five weeks), and should be far longer when the future of Lewisham’s entire healthcare service is being discussed. We also believe that the Special Advisor is acting illegally, as the legislation does not provide him with the power to decide what happens in Lewisham, which should be a separate matter. We hope that the new health minister, Jeremy Hunt, can be persuaded of this by lawyers before he goes ahead with the plans — in February according to the planned timescale.

We also believe that the PFI deals that got the SLHT into this mess — £210 million for two hospitals, £500 million paid so far, but £2 billion still owed! — ought to be renegotiated, on the basis that the companies involved are criminals, ripping off the taxpaying public.

For now, however, we maintain that it is crucial to realise that the government — and the senior management of the NHS — are playing Russian Roulette with our lives. Please respond to the consultation document before midnight tomorrow, and please, if you can, come to a vigil outside Lewisham Hospital between 4pm and 7pm tomorrow. Details are below.

Save Lewisham Hospital Day of Action, Thursday December 13, 2012

The day of action begins at lunchtime, when anyone anywhere who opposes the plans is asked to protest in support of the hospital by wearing white, holding up a sign in support of Lewisham Hospital, taking a photo and sending it to the South London Press.

The details for the torchlit vigil outside Lewisham Hospital are as follows:

4 pm prompt: Local children are being asked to design their own placards — with their slogans, or stories in 10 words or less — attached to sticks or wooden spoons! We would also encourage the wearing of fancy hats if they are available, and warm gloves. Some hand-held lanterns are being made by organisers, and we ask everyone to bring candles in jars, or lights of their choice.

4.45 pm: A group of children will sing, “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Kershaw.”

5 pm: A release of luminous balloons, and then Chinese lanterns, into the night sky — the silent part of the vigil, as we remember everything the NHS has done for us.

5.30 pm: Street-artist musicians ‘Les Zoing’ will be entertaining us, as they did on the ‘Great Lewisham March’ of 24th November.

6 pm: The Strawberry Thieves Choir will sing, and there will be communal singing from song sheets.

6.30 pm: We say goodbye to Kershaw’s report with a ceremonial burning of the last few copies! More entertainment follows, as we Lewisham people stand and chat with strangers and friends until 7pm or beyond.

Note: Please also keep signing the petition launched by Heidi Alexander MP (which currently has over 23,000 signatures and was handed in to 10 Downing Street last Friday), and download the “Don’t Keep Calm, Get Angry and Save Lewisham A&E” poster here, and display it prominently.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Supermaxed: Andy Worthington Speaks at Stop the War Guantánamo Event, Goldsmith’s College, December 12

For anyone in south east London who wants to know more about Guantánamo, about what is happening there now, and about the fate of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, please feel free to come along to “Supermaxed,” an event at Goldsmith’s College in New Cross this Wednesday, December 12, 2012, which has been put together by Goldsmiths Stop the War society. The event runs from 5-8 pm, and is in the RHB Small Cinema — Room 185 in the main building (recently renamed the Richard Hoggart Building).

The event involves a screening of “The Road to Guantánamo,” the 2006 film by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, which was one of the inspirations for me to begin my investigations into Guantánamo that led me to where I am today, and also features a Q&A session with myself and Hilary Stauffer, the deputy director of Reprieve, the legal action charity headed by Clive Stafford Smith. I’m delighted to be speaking at this event, to help to spread the word about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo and the need for those in the UK to press the British government to secure the immediate release of Shaker Aamer, and I’m particularly pleased because, to be honest, Stop the War as a whole has rarely engaged as fully with the horrors of Guantánamo, torture and indefinite detention as it should have, even though Guantánamo, the CIA’s “black sites,” Bagram, Abu Ghraib and all the other illegitimate — but supposedly legitimate — prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq were created as a direct result of the wars whose existence Stop the War was created to oppose.

There’s a Facebook page for the event here, and if you can come along it would be great to see you. If not, please read my latest articles about Shaker Aamer — EXCLUSIVE: A Demand for “Freedom and Justice” from Shaker Aamer in Guantánamo, When Justice Fails: US Refuses to Confirm that Shaker Aamer Will Be Freed from Guantánamo and A Photo of Shaker Aamer After Eleven Years in Guantánamo — and please sign the e-petition to the British government, and the international petition to both the British and the American governments.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The Death of Empathy in Cruel, Heartless Britain

Last Wednesday, while George Osborne was delivering his Autumn Statement, taking aim at the most vulnerable members of society once more, with another savage attack on the welfare state, I was in central London, and I returned home after he had made his smug and visibly heartless performance in the House of Commons, when the Evening Standard was already announcing his new attack on the poor and disabled.

The Standard‘s headline — “George Osborne hits welfare for poor and raids pensions of rich” — was not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Chancellor’s statement, but it failed to dent the prejudices of the two women next to me, who were returning home, presumably from their office jobs. As they idly perused the paper, they complained about the amount of money the unemployed receive, followed swiftly by a complaint that they then sit around at home doing nothing. There was no mention of the fact that most of what the unemployed receive from the government goes to their landlords, or that there is still only one job for every five people who are unemployed, let alone the fact that a large proportion of benefits are actually paid to working people who aren’t otherwise paid enough money to survive on. Why let anything that might lead you to regard the unemployed as fellow human beings interfere with some knee-jerk bigotry?

Complaining that they too were suffering, they then spent the rest of their journey home — disturbingly, to Brockley, where I also live — rather undermining their case, by talking about party dresses and which gyms they attended.

None of this involved any agitation or excitement whatsoever. It was, instead, nothing more than a bland reiteration of the kind of common prejudices that are, disturbingly, far too prevalent in British society today.

What George Osborne put into play on Wednesday was analysed by Randeep Ramesh in the Guardian, who explained that the government was breaking with the tradition of  “increasing benefits in line with consumer price inflation” — currently at 2.2% — and would restrict welfare increases to 1% for the next three years for all benefits except those to the disabled — who are, of course, already being horribly targeted by the government — and their carers. The saving will apparently be £1.43bn a year by 2014-15 — “almost enough to cover the loss of revenue” from the Chancellor cancelling his planned fuel duty rises, and £3.7bn a year by 2015-16, but it remains to be seen what will happen when more and more of the most vulnerable people in society simply cannot afford to live on their benefits.

Osborne, ignoring the number of working poor who rely on benefits to keep them afloat, had the nerve to claim that the policy was about “being fair to the person who leaves home every morning to go out to work and sees their neighbour still asleep, living a life on benefits … we have to have a welfare system that is fair to the working people who pay for it.” The women on my train would presumably agree, without analysing the spin and the lies.

As Ramesh proceed to explain, Osborne’s proposals have to be passed by Parliament, because “the law currently states benefits have to be uprated in line with prices, currently pegged to the Consumer Price Index.”

Anti-poverty campaigners leapt on the Chancellor’s announcement, condemning it as “creating a ‘decade of destitution’ that will affect both the working and workless poor.” Barnardo’s chief executive Anne Marie Carrie said, “Yet again it is children from impoverished families who are unfairly suffering most under the government’s austerity measures. By effectively breaking the link between benefits and inflation today, the chancellor has ensured a bleaker and bleaker future for Britain’s poorest families.” She added, as the Guardian put it, that “low income families in the UK live on just £12 per person per day and the losses would mean difficult choices.”

“We know these households already have to choose between heating the house and buying school uniforms,” she said. “Any plans to bite further into their budgets risk tipping them into overwhelming poverty.”

The Children’s Society also “calculated that, for jobless families with two children, the changes would mean a loss of £430 a year by 2015,” and “took issue with the chancellor’s attempt to pit ‘workers’ against ‘shirkers,’ pointing out that the rise of in-work poverty and spread of low-wage employment had meant that of the 11m people living in poverty, more than half had jobs.”

Matthew Reed of the Children’s Society said, “Although the chancellor chose to present benefit claimants as sleeping at home while others go out to work, the truth is that the majority of families on benefits are working families … Reducing the rate at which benefits are increased to take account of rising prices will make it harder for already struggling families to make ends meet.”

Osborne’s planned cuts are also targetted at housing benefit, limiting the amount paid to councils to a 1% increase as well, which will add to the misery of the low paid and the unemployed in London and the south east in particular, where rents are out of control, and charities are “already warning that ‘deepening benefit cuts’ will have a ‘dramatic impact on homelessness,’” as the Guardian described it.

Ironically, on the morning of Osborne’s statement, the Metro ran a front-page story entitled “Third World Britain,” revealing how much people are already suffering from the Chancellor’s savage cuts to those earning least in society, which provides a chilling indication of how much worse the situation will become over the next two and a half years if no one can halt the Tories’ juggernaut of injustice.

The Metro article — a shortened version of which is available online — explained that, across the country, people are so desperate that they are “walking up to 20 miles to get emergency food handouts,” adding that they are “turning up at food banks on foot because they cannot afford public transport,” and that “nearly all of them have their own homes and many of them are in work.”

The Metro added that the number of people turning to food banks is “expected to double to more than 220,000 this year,” and charities expected “the problem to worsen with further benefit cuts” in the autumn statement.

Will the Labour Party fight back?

So the question now is whether there will be a revolt in Parliament. On Sunday, the Observer suggested that it would indeed, and that Ed Miliband intended “to put Labour at the head of a national revolt to kill off the chancellor’s latest benefit cuts,”  as church leaders and charities united “in protest against the assault on welfare.” The Observer added that Miliband appeared “ready to order his party to oppose real-term reductions in income for millions of the poorest and most vulnerable.” A senior figure close to the Labour leader said, “Make no mistake, we would come down very hard on people who milk the system but we will not confuse them with the vast majority of people — most of them in work — who are really striving, trying to pay the bills and put food on the table.”

It is certainly time for Labour to commit to an alternative to the Tory-led government’s savage austerity policies, although it is not clear that this revolt — even if it materialises — constitutes an adequate sea change, as senior Labour figures generally seem unable to frame a Keynesian response to the ongoing British economic crisis — one that involves spending to stimulate growth. Instead, they remain bewitched by the suicidal obsession with austerity, which, in the Tories’ hands, is meant to destroy the state, and plunge Britain back into the dark ages.

As the Observer also stated, Miliband’s “move to stand up against what he regards as unjust and unfair treatment of millions of people” coincided with a letter from 59 charities and other organisations stating that “the cuts will plunge many more children into poverty and put at risk the principles of the welfare state,” as the Observer put it. The signatories, who include Oxfam, Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, the Child Poverty Action Group, Disability Rights UK and Church Action on Poverty, said that “Osborne’s plans to break the link between benefits and prices must be stopped if the welfare ‘safety net’ — a cornerstone of the Beveridge report 70 years ago — is to be safeguarded.”

They added, “While the chancellor paints a picture of so-called ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers’, our organisations see the reality on the ground: families scraping by in low-paid work, or being bounced from insecure jobs to benefits and back again.” They also described the cuts as “punitive, unfair, and must not happen”.

Other high-level critics of George Osborne include Dr. John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, who criticised the use of “populist rhetoric” regarding the poor. He said, “Talk like this actually does a great disservice to those trapped in low pay who are going out to work every day to try to provide a better life for their families,” and Osborne’s colleague, Vince Cable, the business secretary, who, in an interview in the Observer, not only warned that the economy was at risk of a “triple dip” recession, but also said, “I was critical of some of the language that was used to demonise people who are out of work. It is utterly wrong,” he says. “Most people are out of work through no fault of their own. The worst thing you can do is insult them.”

Those who believe in the almost immeasurable importance of opposing the Tories’ plans need to push Labour to genuinely embrace an alternative view of the world, and not pander to then kind of craven opportunism that has led to politicians playing cynical games with voters and abandoning any attempt to create a vision of an inclusive society. Pointers to this were provided on Sunday by Will Hutton,  who in an article for the Observer entitled, “George Osborne’s savage attack on benefits is an affront to British decency,” asked, “What constitutes a good society? What are our responsibilities and obligations to one another? To what extent is our humanity about looking solely after ourselves or being part of something we call society?” Noting, “It may be unfashionable to defend the conception of a social contract, but our religion and our culture enshrine the notion of mutual responsibility and obligation,” he proceeded to explain:

Life is risky and hazardous for everyone. The bad luck of a broken family, unemployment, poor health, unexpected expenses of old age, mental illness and physical incapacity can hit anyone, however hard working. These risks confront everyone.

A good society recognises these risks and insists they should be shared and insured against in an agreed system of collective insurance. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment proposed that if society was to get beyond theocracy, anarchy or despotism, then it had to be underwritten by such a social contract. To organise society as an individualistic war of one against another was barbaric, while the other models, slavishly following the rules of one religion or one supreme leader, denied freedom.

Cameron and Osborne will publicly say that they still respect such values, but, privately, they are pursuing a different agenda. The terms on which millions have made their plans and life choices have been torn up. The automatic link between inflation and the uprating of benefits is to be scrapped for at least three years. The tax relief available to those building retirement pensions is to be further withdrawn. This comes on top of the capping of benefits, whatever the need, the restrictions on housing benefit, further limiting of incapacity benefit and the shrinking of access to child benefit. Additionally, there is a new bridgehead further to remove employment protection in the labour market, trading employment rights for shares in the company.

Is any of this fair? The heart of fairness is to establish a proportional relationship between contribution and outcome to which everyone consents. People have made calculations about how they are to handle the costs of old age, bringing up their children, physical incapacity or the lack of work in their area on the basis of social contributions to their circumstance that they reckoned on being an inviolable part of the deal. Now they find it is all turned on its head by fiat and for which no one voted. A social contract is a bargain over time. I pay my taxes and national insurance contributions. I should get benefits back when I need them.

What is happening is both illegitimate and contemptible and as the proposals are rolled out, more and more people will start to think so as they are affected too. The anti-welfare opinion poll majorities will begin to dissolve.

I was heartened to see Hutton’s analysis, and also his description of the Chancellor as an “economic illiterate” in the following passages:

Is this necessary? Osborne insists it would be a “disaster” to turn back from his target of balancing the budget within five years and social spending must share the burden. He is an economic illiterate. Economics 101′s first principle is that if households, companies and banks are simultaneously saving and building up surpluses, as they are at present, then someone in the system has to have a deficit to compensate, otherwise there is a downward depressive economic vortex. That someone necessarily is the government. Its deficit is the counterpart of surpluses elsewhere. Osborne could and should have used his autumn statement to give the private sector the confidence to invest, to borrow, to innovate and to spend and so run down its vast £700bn cash stockpile. He should have adopted a bold target for the growth of nominal income, launched a multi-billion pound infrastructure programme and cheap loan guarantee scheme. Then the pressure on the government’s own books would have been relieved.

He did none of these, instead believing that financial repression and shameful withdrawal of benefits are the triggers of recovery.

Also noteworthy was an analysis in Friday’s Guardian by Shuvo Loha, “the managing director of a recruitment firm focused on the banking, engineering and energy and climate change sectors,” and a social activist, who has written a report for Compass entitled, “Strikers, Scroungers and Shirkers.” Asking, “who are the real shirkers and scroungers?” he pointed out:

Big business is guilty of scrounging from the public purse on a monumental scale – often hidden behind a whole political economy rather than some drawn curtains. The billions of pounds in working tax credits paid out every year are not going to the unemployed but to workers to supplement their low income. It is making up the difference between low wages and the minimum necessary amount for families to live on — a living wage. As 29% of low-paid workers work in retail, this sector in particular is coming under intense scrutiny. A report by the Fair Pay Network found that despite collectively making billions of pounds worth of profits and paying their CEOs millions of pounds a year, none of the top four supermarkets were paying their workers a living wage. They could easily do this and still make huge profits at the same time. So why should they be able to scrounge off the rest of us?

More scrounging exists in the housing market but not necessarily where you might expect it. One in five households in the UK rely on housing benefit to put a roof over their heads. Out of these households 87% are low and middle-income families and pensioners — the so-called strivers that the government pretends to support.

Why is it that working people need housing benefit? It’s the same story: the cost of living is not in line with income. The market has failed. Successive governments have tried to correct this failure by moving from an emphasis on building houses that can be rented cheaply to paying landlords directly to cover tenants’ rents. But as 32% of housing benefit claimants rent in the private sector, this means the hard-working striving taxpayer is paying their tax directly into the pockets of private landlords enabling them to expand their property portfolios. Last year this cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn.

This week we’ve also seen the farce of Starbucks offering to voluntarily cough up £10m in tax. Tax laws are clearly not working. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Big business and rich individuals are shirking their responsibility to society on a monumental scale. According to Tax Research UK, the amount of tax that the government is owed is about £120bn more than the amount that is actually paid. To get a sense of the proportions, that is the equivalent to the entire health budget.

Loha concluded by stating that solving these problems “will require many specific measures,” but what leapt out at me in particular was his final line: “if the government focused its efforts on those higher up the value chain by ending the scrounging and skiving of those at the top, the economic outlook for the UK would be much brighter and the government’s planned £123bn worth of ‘fiscal consolidation’ could be rendered obsolete.”

Last thoughts on tax avoidance

That, after a weekend in which Starbucks were targeted by UK Uncut, is something everyone needs to focus on, and not just in relation to the tax-avoiding coffee chain.  Last week, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee issued a timely report on tax avoidance by multinational companies, and chairwoman Margaret Hodge said HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) needed to be “more aggressive and assertive in confronting corporate tax avoidance.”

Starbucks, who had sales of £400m in the UK last year, paid no corporation tax at all last year. As the BBC explained, Starbucks “transferred some money to a Dutch sister company in royalty payments, bought coffee beans from Switzerland and paid high interest rates to borrow from other parts of the business.” However, they are by no means the only criminals shirking their responsibilities to pay tax, as reports also indicated that Google and Amazon are not much better. Amazon’s UK sales last year were £3.35bn, but the company only reported a “tax expense” of £1.8m, and Google UK had a turnover of £395m but paid just £6m to the Treasury.

Can we take on these giants, or do we hope that politicians will act? I’l be interested to hear your responses. I don’t use Amazon, but I have spent many years publicising the fact that they sell my books. Google, on the other hand, is pretty central to my life. Should I pull the plug?

These questions are not meant to detract from the necessity of campaigning against this revolting government for its latest proposals to cut welfare, but it is certainly true that those responsible for our economic woes are not just in the cabinet, although the stench emanating from George Osborne, David Cameron and their colleagues is hugely poisonous to society as a whole.

So while I will continue to illustrate the horrors of this Tory-led government, I will also be looking for ways to be involved in measures aimed at highlighting the profoundly damaging crime of corporate tax avoidance. First of all, though, George Osborne needs to be stopped from indulging in a further display of cruelty towards those who can least afford it.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Quarterly Fundraiser: Please Help Me Raise $2500 to Support My Work on Guantánamo and Social Justice

Please support my work!

Dear friends,

Times are hard, and I don’t want to make them any harder, but the time has come around again when I ask you, if you can, to help support my work as an independent investigative journalist, researcher and commentator. I put out an appeal every three months, and my last appeal was in September, when 22 friends and supporters provided over $1200 to help me continue my work.

All contributions to support my work are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

As an independent investigator and journalist, much of the work I do is unpaid, and it is often only your financial support that enables me to keep on writing about the prisoners at Guantánamo, whose stories I have been researching and writing about for nearly seven years. Although I would be lying if I said that it doesn’t get tiring pushing for the closure of Guantánamo after so long, especially in the face of so much indifference, the existence of the prison remains an affront to all notions of decency — with the 166 men still held facing indefinite detention, for the rest of their lives, unless significant steps are taken to increase pressure on Congress and the President to release them or to put them on trial.

Indefinite detention is shocking under any circumstances, but the horror of Guantánamo is compounded by the fact that, of the 166 men still held, 86 were cleared for release at least three years ago by an interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and yet they are still held. As we approach the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, 2013, I am sad to report that the need to campaign for the prison’s closure is as pressing as ever, but I promise not to give up, and I urge you also to continue pushing for an end to this hateful icon of America’s disregard for the law in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

If you can donate to support my work, you will not only be helping me to continue campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo, and to continue reporting the stories of the men still held there, like Shaker Aamer, who has specifically asked me to write about him; you will also enable me to continue being an independent voice calling for compassion for the most vulnerable members of society in the UK, who are facing an unprecedented assault from the Tory-led government, and also to continue with my latest project, to photograph the whole of London by bike. This is a project that began back in May, which allows me to get fit, to explore the city that has been my home for the last 27 years, and also to explore a new form of expression, analyzing the state of London — politically and materially — through photos and accompanying text.

Whether you can support me financially or not, I thank you for your continued support of my work. Without your interest, it means nothing.

Andy Worthington

London

December 10, 2012

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Will Guantánamo Ever Be Closed?

[image error]Nearly eleven years after the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison opened on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, its much-mooted closure seems as remote as ever.

Last week, there were encouraging noises, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, presented a report prepared by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), looking at the feasibility of housing prisoners in the US. The report found that there were 104 suitable facilities; 98 run by the Department of Justice, and six by the military. Releasing the report, Sen. Feinstein said, “This report demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantánamo without imperiling our national security.”

On the military side, there are three Naval brigs — at Charleston, South Carolina, Chesapeake, Virginia, and Miramar, California — as well as the correction facilities at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and Lewis-McChord in Washington, and the Disciplinary Barracks at Leavenworth. In total, these facilities are almost half-empty.

The other route would be for prisoners to be held in federal prisons. The GAO found 98 suitable prisons, which, between them, hold 373 people convicted of charges related to terrorism.

As Spencer Ackerman explained for Wired, the GAO report is “rigorously agnostic on whether Guantánamo ought to be closed,” and the researchers also pointed out that there were significant obstacles if the prisoners were to be moved, not the least of which is that Congress would have to repeal legislation preventing the Justice Department from taking custody of Guantánamo prisoners.

Nor is the military option any easier. Since 2009, Congress has repeatedly passed legislation preventing the President from bringing prisoners from Guantanamo to the US mainland, and, just days after Sen. Feinstein published the GAO report, the Senate voted, by 54 votes to 41, and with bipartisan support, to ban the administration from moving prisoners from Guantánamo to the US mainland for another year, via an amendment introduced by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) as part of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act.

The NDAA also reiterates a ban on allowing funds to be used for the transfer of prisoners to other countries, and on funds to construct, acquire or modify any detention facility on the US mainland to house any prisoners at Guantánamo, prompting a strong rebuke from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which released a statement in which Congress’s efforts to keep Guantánamo open were described as “misguided when they were enacted and should not be renewed.”

The statement also explained, “If the bill is presented to the President for approval in its current form, the President’s senior advisers would recommend that the President veto the bill.”

Furthermore, the statement noted that, “Since these restrictions have been on the books, they have limited the Executive’s ability to manage military operations in an ongoing armed conflict, harmed the country’s diplomatic relations with allies and counterterrorism partners, and provided no benefit whatsoever to our national security,” and added, “The Administration continues to believe that restricting the transfer of detainees to the custody of foreign countries in the context of an ongoing armed conflict interferes with the Executive’s ability to make important foreign policy and national security determinations, and would in certain circumstances violate constitutional separation of powers principles.”

It was also noted that the ban on constructing, acquiring or modifying a detention facility on the US mainland for any prisoner in Guantánamo “shortsightedly constrains the options available to military and counterterrorism professionals to address evolving threats.”

Despite the strongly worded statement, the whole struggle between Congress and the Executive is playing out as it did last year, when President Obama’s threatened veto did not emerge, and instead he issued a signing statement explaining his objections, but going no further.

Where this leaves the Guantánamo prisoners is unclear. On November 27, Human Rights Watch and 27 other organizations sent a letter to President Obama, “urging him to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2013 if it impedes his ability to transfer detainees out of Guantánamo Bay,” and pointing out that, “if the NDAA is signed with any transfer restrictions in it, the prospects for Guantánamo being closed during your presidency will be severely diminished, if not gone altogether.”

This is not alarmist rhetoric, given that only five prisoners have been released from Guantánamo in the last two years — a number almost matched by the three who have left in coffins. Of the five, three had their habeas corpus petitions granted by a US court (back in the days before the D.C. Circuit Court made habeas corpus meaningless for the Guantánamo prisoners), and two others were released as a result of plea deals.

Although neither was actually a significant  prisoner — one, Omar Khadr, was a child at the time of his capture, and the other, Ibrahim al-Qosi, was a cook for people in a compound associated with al-Qaeda — they were amongst the handful of prisoners put forward for a trial by military commission. Their release, therefore, contrasts even more sharply with the fate of over half of the 166 men still held — the 86 men who were approved for transfer from Guantánamo by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009.

The fact that they are still held when those who cut plea deals and confessed to being war criminals have been released only confirms that, at Guantánamo, every notion of what constitutes justice has been twisted out of any recognizable shape.

Between them, the administration and Congress need to work out how to free those men whose release was recommended by the Task Force, and to try those recommended for trials (around 30 of those who remain), and also to think long and hard about how long the remaining 46 men can continue to be held.

The Task Force recommended this group of men for indefinite detention without charge or trial, because they are allegedly dangerous even though no information that purports to prove this can be presented before a court. That means that the supposed evidence is profoundly unreliable, although the administration accepted the recommendations, and in March 2011 President Obama issued an executive order authorizing the detention of these men, and providing them with periodic reviews of their status about which we have subsequently heard nothing.

If they are to continue to be held on this basis, the administration and Congress should think about whether this designation can really be justified to hold them for the rest of their lives.

Most of all, though, those in positions of power and influence need to release the 86 men that a Task Force of qualified individuals decided should no longer be held, because, as disgraceful as it is to be finding false justifications for holding men forever because of the alleged but apparently unprovable threat they pose, it is even worse to hold men forever that you have publicly stated you no longer wish to hold. 55 of these men were named, for the first time, on just three months ago, and their release should be a priority for everyone in a position to facilitate it.

Note: The photo above is from a set of photos I took in Washington D.C. on January 11 , 2012, at a series of protests marking the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Photos of South East London At Night: Tunnels, the River and the Surrey Canal

South East London At Night: Tunnels, the River and the Surrey Canal, a set on Flickr.

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike — and specifically as the last part of five photo sets recording various autumnal journeys around my home in Brockley, in south east London — the photos collected here record a journey I made on the evening of November 12, 2012, for around two hours, from 9 to 11 pm. This is the 65th photo set in my project, and see here, here, here and here for the previous four sets.

Beginning at my home in Brockley, I cycled down the hill through Lewisham and the edge of Deptford to Greenwich, and then down to the River Thames at Cutty Sark Gardens, along the Deptford shoreline, past Deptford Green, and on to the derelict site of Convoys Wharf, where there are horrible plans to build a £1 billion mini-city for the rich. I then travelled inland to Evelyn Street, the main road that runs to Surrey Quays.

I had been researching the Grand Surrey Canal (1809-1971), which used to run through Deptford to Russia Dock in Rotherhithe, and, at the other end, through New Cross and on to Camberwell (with a separate arm running off to Peckham). None of it is left, sadly, as it was all infilled by the 1970s at the latest, but three sections of it are clearly commemorated in Lewisham and Southwark — in Surrey Canal Road, which marks its passage through the northern part of New Cross (in Lewisham), and, in Southwark, as the arrow-straight main path through Burgess Park, and as a lovely landscaped path, under many original bridges, to the centre of Peckham, by the library.

On this night-time exploration of its traces in and around Deptford, I undertook some guerrilla-style activity to gain access to a small road called Canal Approach in the industrial area between Surrey Canal Road and the Pepys Estate, which is only really interrupted by Evelyn Street, and which once marked the edge of the canal.

From there I found other traces of the canal’s history in and around the Pepys Estate, built in the 1960s on part of Henry VIII’s original Royal Dockyard, and then made my way home via Surrey Canal Road, and then via Mercury Way, which used to be the northern end of the short-lived Croydon Canal, at the point at which it met the Surrey Canal, Cold Blow Lane, which was also connected to the canal, and up to Brockley, where parts of Shardeloes Road used to be the Croydon Canal.

One day I will trace more of the Croydon Canal’s remains, but since I took these photos I have returned again to Deptford to seek out further aspects of the Grand Surrey Canal, which fascinates me. Those photos will have to wait for a while, however, because, after these last five sets of photos from autumn in south east London I am now going to delve into my alarmingly large archive of other photos, taken from July onwards, and return to the end of summer, and other parts of this mesmerising metropolis.

I hope you’ll stay with me for these journeys, and please, if there are any particular areas of London that you would like to see me photograph, let me know. I love to have your feedback, and who knows, I may already have been there and have some photos ready to publish!

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

An Impossible Suicide at Guantánamo

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email. 

Even in death, injustice stalks former Guantánamo prisoner Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who died at the prison in September, six years after he was cleared for release. At “Close Guantánamo,” we covered Adnan’s story at the time of his death, and quoted his lawyers, who stated, “However he died, Adnan’s death is a reminder of the injustice of Guantánamo, and the urgency of closing the prison. May this unnecessary tragedy spur the government to release the detainees it does not intend to prosecute.”

We continue to believe that the death of Adnan Latif is the most powerful reminder of why President Obama must take the lead on releasing the 86 surviving prisoners cleared for release by his interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which issued its report in January 2010, and, in particular, the 55 cleared prisoners whose names were publicly made available for the first time ever by the government in a court case in September, as we explained in our exclusive report, “Who Are the 55 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners on the List Released by the Obama Administration?“

Moreover, while we regard Adnan Latif’s death as the most compelling reason for these men to be released immediately — above and beyond the fact that holding prisoners cleared for release makes a mockery of all notions that the US is a nation founded on respect for the rule of law — we are also concerned that the truth about his death has not been told, and that attempts may be being made to hide uncomfortable truths about how he died.

When Adnan Latif’s death was first reported, the US authorities stated that there were no signs of “self-harm” on his body when he was found “motionless and unresponsive” in his cell on the afternoon of September 8, 2012, in Camp 5, a block where prisoners regarded as troublesome are held.

However, as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) was assigned to investigate Adnan Latif’s death, the official statements dried up, and it was only through dogged investigation that Jason Leopold of Truthout, who has been determined to keep a focus on the story of Latif’s death, found out that his corpse was being held at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and had not been returned to his grieving family in Yemen.

That in itself was troubling, but after many long months the US authorities have now contradicted their initial story, claiming — in an autopsy report that has not been publicly released, and that will not be commented on officially by the US authorities until after Latif’s body has been returned to Yemen — that Latif committed suicide through overdosing on psychiatric medication.

This claim, however, appears to be profoundly unreliable. David Remes, one of his lawyers, told the New York Times that, as the Times put it, “there was reason to be suspicious about how his client was overmedicated.” Remes “voic[ed] skepticism that he could have hoarded his daily dosages without detection,” noting that Latif “was under ‘intense scrutiny’ — including regular monitoring by guards and cameras.”

Remes also “suggested” that his client “may have negligently been given too many pills that day,” which he doubted, “or that the authorities might have deliberately given him access to too much medication hoping he would kill himself.”

One unidentified official discounted Remes’s theories, saying, as the Times put it, that “investigators were working from the premise that Mr. Latif pretended to swallow his drugs for a period and hid the growing stash on his body.” The Times added, “Prison monitoring policies — including how closely guards inspect detainees’ mouths after giving any medication and search their private areas — are now facing review.”

However, through further investigations, Jason Leopold has uncovered a troubling chain of events at Guantánamo prior to Latif’s alleged suicide that also casts doubt on the official story.

In an article entitled, “Latif Autopsy Report Calls Gitmo Death a Suicide: Questions Remain,” published on November 26, Leopold explained that Capt. Robert Durand, a JTF-GTMO spokesman, told him that Latif was sent to Camp 5 Alpha Block, where prisoners are held in isolation, “after being ‘medically cleared,’ because he assaulted a guard with a ‘cocktail,’ a mixture of bodily fluids and food.” Neither he nor another spokesperson, Capt. Jennifer Palmeri, would say when this took place, but Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, told David Remes that Latif was in Camp 5 only a day or two before he died, and that he was his “neighbor.”

Aamer’s statement is central to a chain of events established by six prisoners in total who spoke to David Remes, who, between them, established that he “was first sent from Camp 6 to a psychiatric ward, then the prison hospital and then to Camp 5.” As Leopold described it, “Aamer told Remes last month that, in early August, Latif was in the recreation yard at Camp 6 when he threw a stone at a guard tower and broke the spotlight; he was then taken to the psychiatric ward connected to the prison facility’s hospital.” Another prisoner pointed out that Latif was housed in a wing of the hospital reserved for hunger strikers, and Aamer also said Latif “was on a hunger strike at the time of his transfer to Camp 5.”

Furthermore, Shaker Aamer “contends Latif was told on September 6, two days before his death, he would be given an ‘ESP injection,’ that other prisoners claim ‘makes you a zombie’ and ‘has a one-month afterlife,’ according to unclassified notes of the meeting between Remes and Aamer.”

No one can find any reference to what an “ESP injection” is, but Jason Leopold and Jeff Kaye, writing for Truthout, have spent several years investigating medical experimentation at Guantánamo, including obtaining a Defense Department Inspector General’s report, through the Freedom of Information Act, in which it was noted that “Guantánamo prisoners who act out are ‘chemically restrained’ with unknown medications.”

Shaker Aamer also told David Remes that, “on September 5, three days before his death, Latif broke a fence and ‘escaped,’ presumably from the psych ward, and was then taken to the hospital at the urging of another prisoner who said it would ‘calm him.’”

After explaining that Latif was moved to Camp 5 on September 6 or 7, just one or two days before his death, Aamer also said that Latif “protested his transfer into the cell at Camp 5 because of the constant buzzing noise from a generator located behind a wall.” Aamer told Remes, “He fought and fought against going there.”

Leopold reported that another prisoner “said a female psychologist accompanied Latif from the hospital to Camp 5,” and that Remes had been told by another  prisoner that “the minimum stay [in Camp 5] is three months, ‘regardless of the magnitude of the offense.’”

The female psychologist apparently “said she would communicate Latif’s concerns about being housed in Camp 5 to ‘higher-ups,’” although it is unknown if she did. According to Remes, “Latif said he was happy at the hospital and eventually wanted to return to Camp 6,” although another prisoner said that a guard told Latif that “he would never return to Camp 6.”

That may have been an idle threat, but in the circumstances it is difficult not to wonder if there was more to it, and if the “escape” — and Latif’s persistent troublemaking, caused through his long-standing mental health problems, based on head injuries suffered during a car crash in Yemen in 1994 — led to something other than suicide.

Details of the incident that led to Latif being moved from Camp 6 to the hospital and then to Camp 5 certainly contradict the unnamed official who suggested that Latif had been hoarding his medications so that he could kill himself by taking an overdose.

As Jason Leopold described it, other prisoners “said Latif threw the rock at the guard tower because he was not given his medication ‘on time or not at all,’ according to unclassified notes of meetings between Remes and a half-dozen other prisoners that took place in September and October.” According to these accounts, “Latif went out to the rec yard of Camp 6 and, through an interpreter, sought assistance from guards, asking them to contact ‘the clinic people’ for his medication.” One prisoner said, “The guards waved him off, so he picked up a rock and threw it at one of the towers in the rec area, breaking a spotlight.”

That was during Ramadan, and it “resulted in dozens of soldiers being called into the rec area, some of who rolled up in Hummers, fired their weapons into the ground and threatened to kill Latif,” according to the accounts of several prisoners who were present — and that, of course, is an even more explicit example of a death threat than the veiled one mentioned earlier, in which a guard told Latif that “he would never return to Camp 6.”

Another prisoner provided another perspective on the death threat, but in a more general context, although it is easy to see how Latif could have been singled out, given that he had thrown the rock and had a history of disruption. This prisoner stated, “The guards came into Camp 5 with guns, and beat up the detainees. Other soldiers surrounded the camp. [The Officer in Charge] came and told detainees, ‘You are extremists and I’m going to deal with you in a harsh way. You intend to kill our soldiers; we’ll do the same thing to you.’”

Given the profound doubts about other alleged suicides in Guantánamo — at least four of the six other supposed suicides (excluding Latif’s) — these aspects of the story of Adnan Latif’s death are profoundly disturbing, especially when no explanation has been provided for the removal of his corpse to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, away from all outside scrutiny.

Is there more to the story of Adnan Latif’s death than we have been told? Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we wish to state unequivocally that the public needs to know the full story of his death, and that, although we await the results of the NCIS investigation, sometime next year, we believe that a full outside investigation should be allowed to proceed.

Adnan Latif, scorned in life, deserves nothing less in death than to have the truth of his death properly explained — that, and the release of all the other cleared prisoners who all run the risk of dying before being freed, comprehensively undermining America’s claim that it believes in fairness and justice and showing the world that, as demonstrated at Guantánamo, it is a place of cruelty, secrecy and contempt.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Save Lewisham Hospital: Photos of the Protest and Sham Consultation on December 4, 2012

Save Lewisham Hospital: The Protest and Sham Consultation on December 4, 2012, a set on Flickr.

Yesterday evening, following on from the demonstration on November 24 that attracted 10,000 to 15,000 supporters, many hundreds of Lewisham residents converged on the Calabash Centre, on George Lane in Catford, in the London Borough of Lewisham, to hear — or mostly to confront — Matthew Kershaw, the NHS Special Administrator appointed to deal with the financial problems not of Lewisham, but of the South London Healthcare Trust, in the boroughs of Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley. Faced with crippling debts as a result of PFI deals that ought to have been illegal, the SLHT was put into administration in the summer, the first NHS trust to be subjected to the government’s “Regime for Unsustainable NHS Providers.”

Under that legislation, Kershaw was appointed to come up with solutions. His report was published on October 29, and in it he and his team proposed that the trust’s “historic debts” should be absorbed by the Department of Health, so that its new owners are not “saddled with the issues of the past”, and also proposed that the Department of Health should “pay £20 million to £25 million a year to cover the ‘excess costs’ of the PFIs for the two hospitals until the relevant contracts end.”

This was a least a recognition that the SLHT’s PFI contracts are a disaster, which is certainly true, as they involved a £210 million deal for two hospitals that has so far cost the trust £500 million, and will end up costing £2.5 billion, for hospitals which they don’t even own. However, Kershaw’s report also recommended that the trust should be split up, with King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust recommended to run the Princess Royal, in Orpington, and a merger involving Lewisham Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich.

With the closure of the A&E department at Sidcup, Queen Elizabeth, on a remote, blasted heath in Woolwich, is already catering for the A&E needs of two boroughs, but if Kershaw’s proposals go ahead, Lewisham, with its 250,000 inhabitants, will also lose its A&E, and there will be just one A&E — at Queen Elizabeth — for the 750,000 inhabitants of three boroughs — Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley.

As the Save Lewisham A&E campaign’s website explained, Kershaw also “proposes children’s wards, critical care, complex/emergency surgery and perhaps maternity services be closed by 2015/16, and the hospital’s Victorian buildings be sold off for £17million,” as well as converting Lewisham into a centre of elective surgery for the whole of south east London.

Perhaps some of that sounds good to you, but to me it all stinks.

Every London borough needs its own fully functioning A&E Department, and Kershaw’s proposals will essentially disembowel Lewisham Hospital in a very short period of time. Without being able to deal with emergencies, the hospital will steadily be starved of patients, and, in any case, a hospital that has had 60 percent of its buildings sold, and is giving over most of the rest of its capacity to elective surgery — private surgery, in other words — is clearly not even a cottage hospital and certainly not one that can provide for the needs of a population that is as big as Brighton, or Newcastle, or Hull.

At the consultation, the majority of the people who attended — either those protesting outside, or those who attended the consultation to be, for the most part, patronised — were extremely angry, and with good reason, I believe, as these plans are being sold as a necessity to improve clinical care across south east London as a whole, when, in reality, they are driven by the need to dig the SLHT out of a hole, and by the demands of the government to make savage cuts and financial savings. Money can be found to support the NHS as it needs to be supported, if the political will is there.

From what I could see, no one in the borough believes that it is even remotely possible that services for the people of Lewisham could improve as a result of the proposals, and with good reason, as there is clearly no spare capacity at any neighbouring hospitals — or even those far-flung places like the remote corner of Woolwich inhabited by Queen Elizabeth Hospital — for any of the accidents, emergencies and complicated births that will be begging to be seen elsewhere if the proposals go ahead.

Kershaw and his colleagues, who included Dr. Jane Fryer, his chief medical advisor, Dr. Mike Marriman, the medical director of King’s, and, alarmingly, Dr. Andy Mitchell, the medical director for the whole of the NHS in London, were left in no doubt by the audience that they were regarded as liars and as devious operators who had already made their minds up, that their consultation was a sham, and that people will die if the plans go ahead.

The proposals regarding journey times to Woolwich were accurately dismissed as a fantasy, and there were numerous important contributions from audience members who pointed out the cost, for poor and elderly people, of having to travel elsewhere, and who gave examples of how a degraded A&E, turned into an Acute Care Centre but unable to deal with genuine emergencies, would be revealed as a dangerous absurdity if a sudden emergency occurred — if, for example, a seemingly straightforward birth turned into an emergency because a baby was strangled by its umbilical cord, for instance, let alone if there was any kind of major disaster in Lewisham as a whole.

For myself, however, the issue that kept being raised, but that was never adequately addressed by Kershaw and his colleagues, was the fact that they have exceeded their remit, and that their proposals are probably illegal. The government, Kershaw and his colleagues have all decided that it is appropriate for the “Regime for Unsustainable NHS Providers” to extend from the SLHT to the whole of south east London’s hospitals, even though no other trusts in south London are in financial difficulties. This, we are told, is both financially necessary and prudent in terms of ensuring the best services possible, but even if this were true — and it’s a very big if — it is unclear why everyone involved presumes that they can strike out across the whole of south east London when their remit is to deal with the SLHT.

The ridiculously short time provided for the consultation — just five weeks, ending on December 13, after which there are just another two months until the health secretary, the terminally tainted Jeremy Hunt, makes his decision — is timing included in the legislation for the “Regime for Unsustainable NHS Providers,” but, again, is an insult when presented to the people of Lewisham, who are right to ask why the plans to destroy their hospital are only subjected to five weeks’ consultation as part of legislation tailored for a failed trust, and not one in sound financial health.

There are already lawyers looking at these questions, and I very much hope that if the proposals go ahead, there will be the opportunity to launch a judicial review.

In the meantime, the best way to keep the government and the executioners of the NHS worried is for people to keep fighting. Keep signing the petition launched by Heidi Alexander MP (which currently has nearly 22,000 signatures), download the “Don’t Keep Calm, Get Angry and Save Lewisham A&E” poster here, and display it prominently, and, before December 13, when the consultation closes, fill in the consultation form made available by Matthew Kershaw and his team.

An important guide to cutting through the deliberate attempts to put people off, when filling in the consultation form, has been provided by the campaigning group, Save Lewisham A&E. Please also follow Save Lewisham A&E on Twitter and on Facebook — and see the Twitter hashtag #thankslewisham, where people are telling their moving stories of how staff at the hospital helped them into the world, or saved their lives.

And also remember that it is not just in south east London that hospitals are threatened. In north west London, four out of nine A&E Departments are under threat, and the Lewisham campaign has already made contact with the campaign there, called Save Our Hospitals. In total, as the Daily Mail explained, 26 A&E Departments will be “closed or downgraded across England and Wales as part of a policy to centralise services — despite fury among patients and scepticism from medical experts.”

Anyone interested in working to bring together all those affected is encouraged to attend an NHS Campaign All London Co-ordinating Meeting convened by Labour MP Andy Slaughter on Thursday December 6, 2012 (tomorrow) to plan a London-wide — or national — NHS demonstration early next year. The meeting is, ironically, in the Thatcher Room in Portcullis House, opposite the House of Commons, from 6-8 pm.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Photos: Early Morning Amongst the Graves of St. Alfege Park, Greenwich

Early Morning Amongst the Graves of St. Alfege Park, Greenwich, a set on Flickr.

St. Alfege Park, in Greenwich, in south east London, is part of the former churchyard of St. Alfege Church, the 18th century church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and built on the site of two previous churches dedicated to St. Alfege, who was Archbishop of Canterbury when he was murdered, by Danish raiders who had kidnapped him, on April 19, 1012 AD.

Explaining its history, London Gardens Online provides the following description: “When the original churchyard became full an additional area of land was acquired in 1803 and consecrated as a new burial ground. This in turn became overcrowded by 1853 and the two churchyards and church crypt were then closed for burial, having taken almost 45,000 burials. In 1889 a Church Faculty transferred management and maintenance of the burial land to the local authority, the Greenwich District Board of Works. The churchyard extension to the west, which contained the old mortuary building, was laid out as a recreation ground and opened in 1889. The design and layout of the garden was undertaken by Fanny Wilkinson, landscape gardener of the MPGA [the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association].”

The park is accessed through a doorway in Church Passage, which runs beside the church, and although it is only two hundred years old, and has been a municipal park for over a hundred years, it is a powerful place, its old gravestones adding immeasurable atmosphere to a space that is an oasis of calm in an otherwise busy urban environment.

That distinction was less apparent just after 8 am on a Friday morning in November, when I visited, but at any time of the day or night the park — because of its intimations of mortality — is a place removed from normal life. In case anyone is wondering, I was in Greenwich so early in the day because, with the help of a friend, I was liberating my bike from where it had been locked up overnight after my key snapped in the lock.

Since I first stumbled on St. Alfege Park many years ago, I have always found it to be a particularly special, almost secret place in Greenwich, which somehow eludes the majority of tourists, and the only unpleasantness that I recall in its recent history was in September 2011, when its custodians, the Friends of St. Alfege Park, got rather carried away with their attempts to civilise an overgrown corner of the former churchyard, and ended up attracting widespread outrage, not just from the local media and bloggers, but also from the Daily Mirror, which led to a profuse apology.

What happened was that between 25 and 30 headstones were broken up by a Community Payback team working on behalf of the Friends of St. Alfege Park. The secretary, Johanna Taylor, and another remember of the group, Suzanne Miller, issued a statement, in which they explained, “The Friends of the Park greatly regret our part in this distressing occurrence. In the process of tidying a neglected area of the park, the Community Payback team were asked to remove nettles and other plants that had invaded the ground and adjoining gravestones along a short stretch of perimeter wall at the east end of the park … We believe that the intention was to move any stones that had to be disturbed to a storage area in front of the Old Mortuary building, and that when some were damaged by attempts to remove the plants it proved impossible to carry them and they were broken up. In the event, and for reasons we do not know, they were all broken up.”

They added, “We greatly regret this, and we hope to work with the council and local community to look at appropriate ways to reuse the broken stones, for example, by creating a memorial garden.Although each of these 25 or 30 stones is a part of the history of Greenwich, well over 400 similar gravestones are similarly propped against the parks perimeter walls. We consider that they are all important and of great local interest, though many of those remaining are also illegible and crumbling and they no longer mark actual graves, having been moved from their original positions decades ago.”

I hope you enjoy the photos — the 64th set in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike. See here for the previous set of photos taken in Greenwich immediately before and after this set, and see here and here for the previous two sets of autumn photos taken around south east London (including Greenwich). There’s one more autumn set from south east London to come (out of the many sets of autumn photos I’ve taken in my neighbourhood), and then I’ll be making some older, sunnier photos available, of other parts of London, from the huge backlog of unpublished photos I’ve been building up over the last five months.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The End of Decency: Tories to Make Disabled People Work Unpaid for Their Benefits

[image error]What is wrong with the people of Britain? For two and a half years now, the Tory-led coalition government has been waging war on the most vulnerable members of society — the disabled — and hardly anyone seems to care. In order to cut the welfare bill, the government is paying a fortune to Atos Healthcare, a French-based multinational company, to conduct reviews of disabled people in order to find them fit for work, whether they are or not.

This process, which necessitates cruelty and indifference on the part of the assessors, is hugely stressful for the people subjected to the reviews, and has contributed to hundreds of deaths since it was first introduced (also see here and here for links to some harrowing stories).

I have been campaigning against it for the last two years — see, for example, my articles, Today the Tories Took £100 A Week from Some of the UK’s Most Disabled People: How Can This Be Right?, RIP Karen Sherlock, Another Victim of the Tories’ Brutal, Heartless Disability Reforms, Doctors Urge Government to Scrap Callous Disability Tests, Where is the Shame and Anger as the UK Government’s Unbridled Assault on the Disabled Continues? and Call Time on This Wretched Government and Its Assault on the Disabled.

Now the government has come up with a new plan, which dovetails with its treatment of the unemployed in general, in which young people, primarily, are being forced into “workfare” arrangements — in other words, are being made to work for their benefits on placements, which, shockingly, are often with multinational companies. This ought to be unacceptable, but it appears to be a logical extension of the culture of employing people as unpaid “interns” that plagues the workplace, even though it takes things a step further, making people work for nothing for companies they have no interest in, rather than in fields they actively want to pursue.

Apart from a short probationary period — say a month at most — no one should be taking advantage of the unemployed to pay them nothing — or to make them work for around £1 an hour — and yet this is now becoming the norm, a world in which the unemployed have become a source of insultingly cheap labour, and sanctions are imposed for any failures by the unemployed to jump through the required hoops and, if necessary, be corporate slaves.

The government’s clampdown on the unemployed has always been one of its most hateful policies, as there is no excuse for punishing people for being unemployed during a recession, when there is only one job for every five claimants. That remains the case, and it is depressing to realise how successfully the government has managing to sell a message that the unemployed are all workshy scroungers to the public, whose appetite for hating the poor and vulnerable is as reprehensible as their political masters’ cynicism and disdain for those less fortunate than themselves.

From tomorrow, according to the government’s new plan, workfare is to be rolled out for the disabled, as Shiv Malik explained in an important article for the Guardian on Friday, which I’m cross-posting below.

Particularly noteworthy, I thought, are the passages pointing out how the mandatory work programmes are complete failures — successful only in transferring taxpayers’ money to private companies like Emma Harrison’s discredited a4e — even though they continue to be taken up enthusiastically — by London’s mayor Boris Johnson, who wants 18-24 year olds to work for three months unpaid, and in Derbyshire, where 18-24 year olds will be made to work for six months unpaid to secure their benefits.

Also significant, in relation to the unemployed, is the Department of Work and Pensions’ claim that the unpaid work should be “of community benefit.” This might sound acceptable, but it is clear that it is a ruse, that private contractors are being brought on board without scrutiny, and that, in fact, there will be no attempt whatsoever to police what happens — a recipe for disabled people dying in unsuitable workplaces while being exploited by inappropriate employers.

Also deeply shocking — perhaps the most shocking aspect of the whole sordid story — is the DWP’s confirmation that “the work placements do not have any time limit.”

No time limit? Is that for real?

Please read the article below, and then get involved. Tomorrow (December 3), please join other campaigners in a day of remembrance for the victims of Atos and the government, and please urge your MP to sign the Early Day Motion put forward by John McDonnall MP, which states:

That this House wishes to record the case of Mr Brian McArdle who, having suffered a blood clot on his brain, was left paralysed on one side, unable to speak properly and blind in one eye and yet was summoned to an Atos work capacity assessment, before which he suffered a further stroke and was eventually informed he was to lose his disability benefits; notes with sadness that Mr McArdle died from a heart attack the day after his benefits were stopped and that his 13 year old son Kieran wrote to Atos to tell the company that their assessments ‘are killing genuine people like my dad’; and appreciates why disability campaigners like Susan Archibald are calling for the suspension of Atos assessments, and why Jim Moore and other campaigners are calling for 3 December to be a day of remembrance for all Atos victims.

Also keep an eye out for the Twitter hashtag #wowpetition, which stand for “War on Welfare.” There’s also a website here, where various campaigners are currently finalising the wring for a new e-petition, to be launched soon.

Sick and disabled braced for enforced work-for-benefits programme

By Shiv Malik, The Guardian, November 30, 2012

Welfare claimants could be forced to work without pay and be stripped of benefits under scheme starting on Monday

Wayne Blackburn was born unlucky — his mother’s umbilical cord got wrapped around his neck, starving his brain of oxygen. Now his legs don’t work.

“Imagine the worst cramp you’ve ever had,” he says. “That’s in both my legs 24/7 … I literally walk a few steps and I’m in agony.”

Blackburn, 36 has degenerative spastic diplegia, a type of cerebral palsy. He knows he will have a good day when he gets four hours of sleep. On a bad night he screams in pain and between the tears he hardly sleeps at all.

He’s no scrounger, he says. Until 2009, Blackburn, from Nelson, Lancashire, was in work. After marrying his girlfriend he wanted to provide for her so he took a job in retail that involved being on his feet.

“For a time I was quite successful at it,” he says. “[But] it made me a lot worse. I did that for just under two years.” Though he would like to return to a job, Blackburn says he is in the worst physical condition he has ever been and is permanently dosed on multiple painkillers.

Without any physical examination, Blackburn says, the Department for Work and Pensions put him on employment support allowance (ESA) and in the work-related activity group (WRAG), for those soon to be back in employment.

Like tens of thousands of others in the WRAG, Blackburn feels that the assessment process is desperately flawed and that he should not have been put into that group because there is no way he can take a job at this time.

Despite this, in just a few days, Blackburn may be forced to work without pay whether he likes it or not.

On Monday, the government will allow private back-to-work companies and jobcentre case managers to force Blackburn and more than 300,000 sick and disabled welfare claimants into unpaid work experience for an unspecified length of time.

Also from that day — the UN’s international day of persons with disabilities — if those in WRAG who have illnesses ranging from cancer to paralysis to mental health issues do not comply with such instructions, they can be stripped of up to 70% of their benefits and forced to live on £28.15 a week.

According to the latest figures, between 1 June 2011 and 31 May 2012 there were 11,130 conditionality sanctions applied to ESA WRAG claimants. The average length of such sanction is seven weeks.

Blackburn says he is now “petrified”. “They could call me in on Monday and say ‘right, you’ve got do to this, this and this’. And if I don’t, they can sanction me and that scares me … it makes me so nervous, it makes me physically sick.”

Mandatory work exists for those who are not sick. Tens of thousands of unemployed people have passed through four weeks’ unpaid placements on the mandatory work activity (MWA) scheme.

More have passed through the work programme, which this week was found to have utterly failed to meet its benchmark targets to get the long-term unemployed back to lasting employment.

The MWA scheme also does not work. The DWP’s most recent study is clear about its efficacy: it has zero effect on increasing people’s chances of getting a job. Nevertheless, the idea of forcing those on benefits to undertake weeks and months of unpaid work has spread. In August the London mayor, Boris Johnson, announced he was using European social fund money to force 18- to 24-year-olds to commit themselves to 13 weeks of unpaid work.

A few weeks ago Derbyshire job centres said they would be making their 18-24 year olds work for six months unpaid as a condition of their benefits.

Leaked this week, the DWP memo that permits those who are sick and disabled to also be forced into unpaid work is clear: “It has now been agreed work programme providers will be able to use mandatory work placements as another measure through which to help ESA WRAG participants move closer to the labour market.

“If a work programme provider identifies a suitable participant and ensures the work placement is of community benefit, they can mandate them in the usual way.”

The DWP confirmed with the Guardian that the work placements do not have any time limit.

The phrase “for community benefit” is oblique; since February the – even when instructed to do so by the information commissioner – because it fears the MWA scheme will collapse under the weight of public protest if details are released.

Under further questions from the Guardian the DWP has admitted that although placements are meant to be for community benefit, private, profit-seeking companies can participate in the scheme.

The DWP said: “Although the department does not rule out the possibility that placements in the private sector could meet the requirement for placements to be of benefit to the local community, it is likely that the majority of mandatory work activity placements will be outside the private sector.”

Ingeus Deloitte and Seetec, two of the larger companies involved in administering MWA, have refused to comment on whether they are forcing unemployed people to work for private companies but said they abided by the “community benefit” rule.

This month, one of the biggest charities known to be involved in MWA, the British Heart Foundation, said that it was pulling out of the programme. The charity said it was offered cash incentives by private companies running the programme if it took on jobseekers. The BHF refused such payments, as it would have meant the charity being paid while its volunteers — in desperate need of a job — worked for no pay in return.

“Our involvement in work programme schemes has always been about finding people who want to work in our shops, rather than providing a source of income for the charity. As such, we tell BHF staff to decline payments from agencies” Retail Director, Mike Taylor, said.

Ingeus and Seetec said they did not offer inducements to organisations for taking on unpaid jobseekers.

The DWP said it was not troubled by this practice: “We pay providers to find us placements, it’s up to them what arrangement they make with organisations who will take someone on.”

The new policy of involving sick and disabled people in mandatory work activity has raised similar concerns at Cancer Research UK, which is also pulling out of mandatory schemes from the new year. “We have made the decision to no longer offer any ad hoc local arrangements for anyone on the mandatory work activity placement scheme from 1 January 2013,” said Simon Ledsham, director of trading.

The disability charity Scope, which has taken on unemployed people on mandatory placements under a set of internal practices, is now urgently reviewing its involvement and may also pull out.

“People that do work experience in our shops tell us they really value the chance to learn retail and customer service skills, build confidence and get used to being in a working environment,” said chief executive Richard Hawkes.

“But these developments raise some very serious questions about providing work experience placements for people who have to undertake the activity as part of the Government’s back-to-work scheme.

“We are carrying out an urgent review into whether it remains the right thing for us to do to offer work experience in this particular context.”

Shadow employment minister, Labour’s Stephen Timms also told the Guardian that the new policy of mandatory placements was “a recipe for disaster”.

“We know that a large group of people declared to be capable of returning to work are in fact not.  Forcing them into mandatory jobs is a recipe for disaster”, Timms said

“Ministers need to focus first on fast and fundamental reform, and to get the basics right.”

Explaining the policy, employment minister Mark Hoban said: “Some people on sickness benefits haven’t worked for a long time or may not have had many jobs, which will make it harder for them to find work in the future.

“Work experience is a very good way to increase someone’s confidence and get them ready for their move into a job when they are well enough.”

The minister added: “People on sickness benefits who do all they can to improve their chances of moving back into a job have nothing to worry about.

“They will get their benefits and we will do all we can to help. But in the small number of cases where people refuse to stick to their part of the bargain, it’s only right there are consequences.”

Note: For more of my photos from the protest against Atos Healthcare on August 31, see here (and here).

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.