START DEMAND DISCUSS
20/20
NHS PRIVATISED:
OVER CROWDED
20/20
20/20
A TAX ON THE
TRIDENT SPENDING
20/20
20/20
BYE, BYE,
ALL UK RESIDENTS
20/20
20/20
THE UK
UNIONS STRIKED
20/20
20/20
SUBSIDISED TRAIN PRIVATISATION
RUNNING OUT OF
20/20
POWER TO THE PEOPLE,
IT STAR MAKE S AS SOO YOU P APAR
RTS TO SENSE ON AS PICK IT RT…
20/20
POWER TO THE MASSES!
Thanks to your Secretary of State for Energy!
FRACKING SPACE!
OFF THE RAILS
Thanks to your Secretary of State for Transport!
DOWN
Thanks to your Secretary of State for Work and Pensions!
20/20
SUBSIDISED TRAIN PRIVATISATION
20/20
ALL UK RESIDENTS
BEGS FOR EU MEMBERSHIP
Thanks to your Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs!
Thanks to your Home Secretary!
DATA SOLD
20/20
TRIDENT SPENDING
CULTURE!
Thanks to your Secretary of State for Culture!
Thanks to your Secretary of State for Defence!
REACHES ÂŁ100BN
POOR Thanks to your Chancellor of the Exchequer!
Thanks to your Secretary of State for Justice!
UNDER FUNDED
“ YOU’RE ALL PAYING FOR IT ” Thanks to your Secretary of State for Health!
NHS PRIVATISED:
CONVER SATION 20/20
DEBATE ISSUES
NHS PRIVATISED: YOU’RE ALL PAYING FOR IT! “If you want to privatise something and destroy it, a standard method is first to defund it, so it doesn’t work anymore, people get upset and accept privatisation” —Naom Chomsky The recent King’s Fund study has ranked the UK 13th out of 15 original EU members on GDP proportion health spending. This low ranking has led to the King’s Fund casting doubts on ministers’ claims they are giving the NHS “generous cash settlements”. Private Companies have been quick to swoop; Virgincare have been handed more than £1BN’s worth of contracts and now run more than 230 NHS and social care services. Whilst this is happening polls consistently show that public opinion favours a nationalised NHS with only 7% believing the NHS should be ran by the private sector. This was never the intention of our National Health Service, the original announcement explicitly reads ‘There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a “charity”. You are all paying for it…’ Privatisation offers no better health care and furthermore, as Jacky Davis points out, polls show that “people also want accountable health care, while private contracts hide behind ‘commercial confidentiality”. The chair of the House of Commons public accounts committee, Margaret Hodge, says that even she can’t “break through their wall of secrecy.” The Conservatives are systematically attempting to destroy the NHS as we know it — let’s not forget that Jeremy Hunt coauthored a book which called for the introduction of a private insurance system. Thanks to your Secretary of State for Health! OVER CROWDED UNDERFUNDED The Ministry of Justice has admitted prison overcrowding has been underestimated for the past six years in England and Wales. The National Offender Management Service annual reports failed to record that two prisoners, not one, were living in crowded conditions when they were in a cell designed for one person. We are currently at a stage where three in four men’s jails are holding more people than they are designed for. The most overcrowded prison is Leeds which is designed to accommodate 669 prisoners but the Category B jail has in fact been found to be holding 1,218. Between the end of January 2013 and the end of January 2015, the prison population rose from 83,062 to 83,680. Over the same period, 12 prisons were either closed or re-roled. Leadership on this issue has failed to amount and it has lead to campaigners to do key investigations. The Howard League for Penal Reform, revealed that, on a typical day, almost 19,000 prisoners were doubled-up (two in a one man cell) and about 800 were trebledup (three in a two man cell). Unsurprisingly it was also found
that doubling or trebling is also the norm in many privately-run prisons, including Serco-run Doncaster, G4S-run Birmingham, Nottingham, Preston, G4S-run Altcourse, Sodexo-run Forest Bank, Durham, Manchester, Pentonville and Lincoln. Privatisation is not a problem solving method, it is a problem avoiding one. Thanks to your Secretary of State for Justice! THE UK BEGS FOR EU MEMBERSHIP In three months time the UK will hold a referendum on whether to remain, or leave, the European Union. If we leave we are potentially jeopardising all the positives of our current EU membership; 57% of our trade is with the EU, the free movement of people and the revolutionary change this has created in cultural understanding and appreciation, regulations to protect our beaches and air quality, farming subsidies, protection of our human rights, increased product safety, the breaking up of monopolies, equal pay, shared intelligence and security… if nothing else brought peace! The polls have shown no clear sign of which route the UK will take on June 23rd and we are potentially on track for isolation. Thanks to your Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs! UNIONS STRIKED DOWN The Trade Union Bill was proposed in late 2015 and to put it bluntly threatens our basic right to strike. The concerning parts of the bill read as followed: Agency workers will be allowed to replace striking workers— this undermines striking, threatens health safety, brings in inexperience and puts the UK at odds to the rest of the EU. The International Labour Organisation, a body of the United Nations has even urged the UK government to review some of the most controversial aspects of the trade union bill to ensure that they do not contravene international labour law. Already thorough picketing rules will become tougher. Even to the point where picketing supervisors will be required to carry a letter of authorisation which must be presented upon request to the police or “to any other person who reasonably asks to see it”. These excessive rules undermine free speech and threaten our civil liberties. Calls for more democratic strike voting systems; secure electronic and workplace strike ballots have instead been met with arbitrary thresholds. These thresholds amount to 80% of those voting, on a 50% turnout — let’s not forget our current government only had the backing of 24% of those eligible to vote. Unions protect our rights, defend our workforce and help thousands a year through crucial legal action. Countries such as America, with overall weaker unions are now paying the price as the rise of monopolies has led to huge
unruly political involvement and ultimately corruption. You can find your union at: http://www.worksmart.org.uk/ unionfinder/ Thanks to your Secretary of State for Work and Pensions! ALL UK RESIDENTS DATA SOLD The Investigatory Powers Bill was proposed by Theresa May in which she outlined sweeping new powers that are intended to combat paedophiles and terrorists online. The problem being that it is ill thought through and could potentially harm innocent people. Major concerns have been raised by senior politicians and industry experts; even to the extent of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo! all raising concerns. Authorities will have access to everything your phone or computer does. Your communications data will be held by internet companies for a year, and your discussions with your MP are no longer secret and domestic providers (internet companies) will be obliged to assist authorities in “giving effect to equipment interference” — in practice that means hacking. There is no reason we should have to give up our liberties in the fight for safety. Since whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden have brought attention to snooping charters around the world the overwhelming consensus has been public outcry. A YouGov poll showed that only 6% of the public thought that the Government had made a clear and compelling argument for the Bill. 71% also said they didn’t trust that the data collected would be kept secure. Thanks to your Home Secretary! BYE, BYE, CULTURE! Channel 4 is publicly owned. It is commercially ran and funds itself through selling advertising space. At the same time, it has a public service broadcasting remit so it produces high quality and innovative content. It is currently being reviewed by the Department of Culture and its future is being assessed; this includes privatisation. The Government accidentally leaked new plans with the document held by an official photographed outside Downing Street stating, “Work should proceed to examine the options of extracting greater public value from the Channel 4 Corporation, focusing on privatisation options in particular.” This sets a worrying precedent if nationalised media corporations are sold off as next in the firing line would inevitably be the BBC. Past bills have already been proposed targeting smaller BBC assets such as BBC Worldwide. This decision would be against public opinion with regular petitions entitled ‘Save Our BBC’ reaching hundreds of thousands signatures. Thanks to your Secretary of State for Culture!
TRIDENT SPENDING REACHES £100BN Trident is made up of four nuclear submarines. Any one of which can carry up to 40 nuclear warheads on board. Each of these warheads is eight times more powerful than the atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima. These weapons have no legitimate purpose: their use would be illegal under almost every conceivable circumstance, as huge numbers of civilian casualties would be unavoidable. That is why the International Court of Justice ruled in 1996 the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be contrary to the rules of international law. The government is in favour of replacing Trident at a cost of around £100 billion. This money would be enough to fully fund A&E services for 40 years, employ 150,000 new nurses, build 1.5 million affordable homes, build 30,000 new primary schools, or cover tuition fees for 4 million students. The CND, Scrap Trident Movement and many more are calling for the scrapping of trident. Join them in their call. Thanks to your Secretary of State for Defence! A TAX ON THE POOR Global firms such as Starbucks, Google and Amazon avoid paying tax on their British sales to the tune of £12bn. Google have recently been in the spotlight as George Osborne has failed to retrieve the amount he claimed he would from the 2005–14 period. And even still their tax arrangements look dodgy. Critics of the tax settlement have calculated that Google generated sales of £24bn in the UK between 2005 and 2014. It has reported profit margins of between 25% and 30%, giving an estimated profit of about £7.2bn. As it already agreed to pay about £70m in addition to the £130m settlement, Google’s effective tax rate is between 2% and 3%, compared to the 20% headline rate of corporation tax. This means that Google pay a tenth of the price that the poorest, tax eligible, people in our country do. Once the case of Google is put in to context with other big name brands dodging tax the issue becomes very problematic. Starbucks, Amazon, Boots, Vodafone, Topshop, HSBC and many more are all corporations that our government need to be clamping down on. Until then we urge you to take direct action. Taking your business elsewhere is direct action. Thanks to your Chancellor of the Exchequer! SUBSIDISED TRAIN PRIVATISATION OFF THE RAILS Since British Rail was privatised in 1993, rail services in the UK have been provided by private companies. Passenger services are franchised, for a specified period, to train operating companies. The award of the franchise is determined by the Department for Transport, which assesses the bids on a number of
criteria, including the projected public subsidy and the amount of money the franchise is expected to return to the government. There are currently 16 franchises in the UK, all run by private firms. Network Rail, a not-fordividend company set up by the government in 2002, owns and operates most of the rail infrastructure in England, Wales and Scotland. Rail privatisation was sold to the public in the 1990s with the promise of a better, cheaper railway that would require less public subsidy. Private firms would bring capital and innovation to the railways. None of these promised benefits have materialised. According to the Rebuilding Rail Report, the cost of running the railways has more than doubled in real terms since privatisation, from £2.4 billion during the five year period 1990–95 to around £5.4 billion per year during 2005–10. The McNulty report on the costs of operating the rail network showed that the UK network is around 30% more expensive than its European counterparts. Thanks to your Secretary of State for Transport! RUNNING OUT OF FRACKING SPACE! Each gas well requires an average of 400 tanker trucks to carry water and supplies to and from the site. It takes 1–8 million gallons of water to complete each fracturing job. The water brought in is mixed with sand and chemicals to create fracking fluid with approximately 40,000 gallons of chemicals are used per fracturing. This tracking fluid contains up to 600 chemicals, including known carcinogens and toxins. During this process, methane gas and toxic chemicals leach out from the system and contaminate nearby groundwater. Methane concentrations are 17x higher in drinking-water wells near fracturing sites than in normal wells. Contaminated well water is used for drinking water for nearby cities and towns and there have been over 1,000 documented cases of water contamination next to areas of gas drilling as well as cases of sensory, respiratory, and neurological damage due to ingested contaminated water. The waste fluid is left in open air pits to evaporate, releasing harmful VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere, creating contaminated air, acid rain, and ground level ozone. Many countries have taken steps to ban and reduce fracking; including our neighbours Scotland and Wales. If public opinion was listened to then the government would realise we should follow in their steps with 43% saying that shale gas extraction should not happen in the country while less than a third think it should. Alternative energy resources need to be found, but they must be safe for both people and planet, fracking is not and so we call for renewables to receive better funding. Thanks to your Secretary of State for Energy!
Sources: www.theguardian.com www.independent.co.uk www.nhscampaign.org www.nhsforsale.info www.ipsos-mori.com www.yougov.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk www.worksmart.org.uk www.tuc.org.uk www.cnd.uk.org www.scraptrident.org www.wired.co.uk www.weownit.org.uk www.ft.com www.bringbackbritishrail.org www.parliament.uk www.taxresearch.org.uk www.ukuncut.org.uk www.mirror.co.uk www.criminaljusticealliance.org
Designed and written by: Freddy Mills www.freddymills.co Tom Young www.tomyoung.co Will Bindley www.willbindley.com Printed by: Newspaper Club www.newspaperclub.com POWER TO THE PEOPLE, POWER TO THE MASSES!