Ealing people turn out to save hospital

HUNDREDS of local people packed Ealing Town Hall on Wednesday 15^th February to defend Ealing Hospital from threatened cuts in the Government’s latest five-year plan – Shaping a Healthier Future and Sustainability (SaHF) and Transformation Plan (STP). The hall was so full that many had to be turned away from the meeting.

The campaign group Save Our Hospitals previously claimed that the plans mean that 600 hospital beds will be lost with the closure of Charing Cross and Ealing hospitals.

The NHS has denied these hospitals will close but they are scheduled to be seriously reduced, losing Accident and Emergency (A&E) units and relegated to local hospital status – a step along the road to complete closure at a future date. Ealing has already lost its maternity and paediatric units.

SaHF plans have also seen the closure of Central Middlesex and Hammersmith A&Es

Eve Turner, secretary of Ealing Save Our NHS, who spoke at the meeting, told the press after the meeting: “It’s beyond belief that even as they are sending people home early from overcrowded hospitals, the local health bosses are still defending their plans to cut hundreds of beds along with over 7,750 NHS staff, and reduce A&E capacity by 64,000.

“But they have money for private spin doctors and management consultants – they paid one firm over £30 million to advise them on cuts. People are getting angrier all the time and I don’t blame them.” 

 She called on people to get involved in campaigned and support the national demonstration on 4^th March.

Julian Bell, leader of Ealing Council, which organised the meeting, and Steve Cowan from Hammersmith and Fulham Council, said that they were refusing to support plans to cut even more beds and the A&Es in Ealing and Charing Cross Hospital. Cllr Bell claimed it would be the equivalent of a city the size of Leeds being left with no A&E.

Another speaker at the meeting was Ealing Liberal Democrats Cllr Jon Ball, who said: “NHS chiefs deny they will close Ealing Hospital but a hospital without an A&E, that performs no surgery and with no overnight beds, is not a hospital. Ealing deserves a real hospital not a glorified polyclinic.”

Dr Onkar Sahota, a Greater London Authority member and GP also spoke at the meeting.

Meanwhile Kelly Ward, a single mother of two boys living in Ealing, has launched a petition to save her local Greenbrook GP surgery from planned closure.

More than 2,500 patients will have to find a new GP unless the surgery can be saved from being shut down.

Kelly Ward said: "There are a lot of angry patients. I've been with Greenbrook since they were relocated into Brentford Health Centre many years ago.

"Without the love and support my doctors have given me and my family over the years, I wouldn't know where we would be.

"As a small surgery it works well, we don't need to wait weeks for appointments, maybe the inspiration of Greenbrook will open the eyes to the NHS and not do this; all you will cause is misery and upset."

Anti-fascists protest against alt-right gallery

by New Worker correspondent

AROUND 200 anti-fascists braved seriously cold weather last Saturday to assemble outside an art gallery in Dalston, after the LD50 gallery hosted and promoted racist meetings and other events.

The protest was organised by the Shut Down LD50 campaign, who said: “The gallery has recently curated one of the most extensive programmes of racist hate speech to take place in London in the last decade.

“LD50 has acted as a platform for a cross section of the most virulent advocates of extreme-right ideology. Talks have been given by prominent white supremacist, misogynists and people promoting violence against immigrants.

“The speakers who participated in the events at LD50 include Peter Brimelow and Brett Stevens. Brimelow is described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre [based in Montgomery, Alabama] as a ‘leading anti-immigrant activist’ and publisher of works by anti-Semites. 

“Brett Stevens publicly supported the actions of fascist mass murderer Anders Breivik.

“Their hate speech cannot be ‘free speech’ when it advocates violence in the pursuit of authoritarianism and racial supremacy.”

These racists are part of a new fascist movement that calls itself alt-right, claiming that they are being persecuted by anti-racists and feminists and denied free speech. They support Donald Trump’s presidency and he does not reject them.

The owner of the LD50 gallery, Lucia Diego, recently expressed support for Donald Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the United States on social media.

A Facebook page for the LD50 exhibition included an emblem of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a South African neo-Nazi group.

Ms Diego expressed disappointment at the decision by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to hang work by Muslim artists in place of pieces by giants including Matisse and Picasso – a striking protest by an art institution against a federal policy. “It actually diminishes western culture and tradition,” she said.

She described the LD50 exhibition on the alt-right as “a study of what is happening online and how these ideologies are emerging.”

Andrew Osborne, 42, a fine art technician at the Royal College of Art who has lived in East London for 20 years, helped to organise the protest. “There was a Facebook argument going on and then the more you looked into the gallery the more unseemly it seemed,” he said. “I don’t see why we should tolerate fascism.”

Far-right supporters had threatened to stage a counter-protest but no one turned up.

One lone counter-protester appeared with a small cardboard sign appealing for “free speech”. His presence provoked a storm of noisy chanting and he was told in no uncertain terms that promoting racist and sexist violence goes beyond the bounds of normal free speech.

But in spite of their very noisy anger no demonstrators attempted to assail the man. Nearby police kept a low profile.

One protester, who said she’d lived in the neighbourhood for 30 years, described the area as a “diverse borough in terms of race, class, ethnicity; everyone here lives happily side by side: Jews, Muslims, everyone.”

But the gallery, she said, was out of line. “I wouldn’t set foot in that place unless I had a bomb with me. No platform for the right, for fascism.”

After an hour or two the demonstrators marshalled themselves for a march through the busy streets of Dalston.

Mayor of Hackney Philip Glanville told the local press after the protest: “Hackney supports artistic freedom of expression and free speech,” but added: “There are clear limits. Racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and xenophobia have no place in Hackney.

“We condemn businesses such as LD50 which promote and give a platform to racism, xenophobia and hate speech. We should not allow hate to become normalised or acceptable.”

He added that he had asked police borough commander Detective Chief Supt Simon Laurence to “look into the actions of LD50 and to explore whether the law has been broken and how we can work together to reassure the wider community.”

Luci Diego had planned another alt-right exhibition in March but is now reconsidering the plan.

No aid to Ukrainian Nazis!

Gerry Downing, Theo Russell and Andy Brooks on the line

by New Worker correspondent

The call for solidarity with the anti-fascist resistance in Ukraine one again echoed across Whitehall at a protest picket last weekend. NCP leader Andy Brooks and other London comrades joined the picket opposite Downing Street on Saturday to denounce British support for the puppet regime in Kiev and stand by the Ukrainian anti-fascists and the Novorossiyans who took up the gun to drive the nazi gangs out of eastern Ukraine.

Theo Russell and Dermot Hudson from the NCP and Gerry Downing of Socialist Fight regularly took the mike during the early evening protest called by the NCP with the support of Solidarity with Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine (SARU) and Socialist Fight. Others leafleted the passers-by with demands to end British and other NATO support for the fascist regime in Kiev.

British imperialism gives military and financial support to the illegal regime in Ukraine, which includes Nazis and which idolises Stepan Bandera, a Second World War Nazi collaborator whose followers in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists eagerly set about murdering Jews and Poles during the German occupation and became a willing tool of the CIA to spread terror across Soviet Ukraine and People’s Poland during the Cold War.

There is absolutely no democracy in Ukraine, and its working people are being ruthlessly crushed. The Kiev regime, which includes Nazis, has outlawed left-wing movements including the Ukrainian communist party and the Marxist Borotba movement.

The picket, the fourth in Whitehall over the past six months, attracted a lot of sympathetic attention on the street that links Trafalgar Square to the Westminster Parliament as well as the support of the Novorossiyan media which relayed a photo-story of the action via the Donbass News Agency (DONI) on Monday.

• DONI report of the picket