Leeds Hospitals Trust

The hospitals in Leeds are due to lose up to 1000 jobs. The Trust's web site fails to report the issue. They deliberately didn't communicate about the job losses either directly or through the trade unions to their staff. They have known about the problem for several months.

The reason for the "crisis" is that they are going to have an £11 million deficit. This sounds a lot but it is less than 0.015% of their turnover. The Leeds Hospitals provide support to other hospitals in Yorkshire and this can prove expensive. For instance some of their pioneering work on heart attacks is initially expensive but it stops patients returning for repeated expensive drug programmes.

The Leeds Hospital Trust was instructed by the Yorkshire and Humber Strategic Health Authority to immediately balance its books. There is no one from Leeds on this body. This dictat precipitated the job crisis. It stems directly from Brown's increasingly difficult struggle to balance the UK's budget without taxing the rich or cutting the spiralling military expenditure.

There is no chance of either the Trust or the Authority standing up to central government because they are all appointed by them. Every non-executive member is a representative of the upper middle class that New Labour so cravenly serves. After nearly ten years of Blair these bodies do not have a single person who lives in public housing and in the case of the authority no one who lives near the centre of a major town. This is a clear example of the class war so viciously waged by Brown and Blair.

And what of the Trade Unions? New Labour Councillor Sharon Hamilton, secretary of the Leeds Hospital Trust Unison branch, expressed her dismay to the Evening Post that the unions were not told sooner. A month earlier she helped to organise a demonstration against health service cuts in Leeds.

It is clear that New Labour is planning to privatise the Health Service. The hospitals' accounts keep on mentioning dividends. Their accounts are set up to mirror private companies to prepare the way. The trust's board is packed with accountants from the private sector. Blair constantly wails on about the need to modernise the NHS - 'modernise' being his code word for privatisation.

The unions can stop this nonsense at once by refusing to continue to fund New Labour. With the millionaire mafia no longer lending or giving them any money they are bankrupt to at least £30 million. However the leadership of Unison, both nationally and in Leeds, have refused to fight to withhold the money. Members of the hospital trade unions should demand immediate action. There are better ways to spend their hard-earned cash

A name from the past

Those who followed the battles in Leeds North East Labour Party over Liz Davies and its subsequent destruction will recall the role paid by Colin Challen, the Leeds New Labour full-time organiser.

Young Colin came to Leeds with a reputation as being a bit of a lefty. Friends fondly remembered his role as a proper Labour councillor in Hull, his party- (ie fun) going activities and his work with the anti-spook magazine Lobster. However he changed into a political witch-hunter, helping to destroy one of the largest and most active local Labour parties in the North. Happily this did lead to the formation of the Alliance for Green Socialism. Colin was "rewarded" with the parliamentary seat of Morley and South Leeds.

Colin looked set up for life in this safe seat. Unfortunately boundary changes have eliminated the adjacent parliamentary seat of Normanton. Its existing MP Ed Balls (partner of Yvette Cooper, MP for Castleford and Pontefract, and a leading Brown apparatchik) has nowhere to go. Initial reports had him going to East Hull to replace Prescott but apparently the forty-mile trip was too far for him so he has decided to go for Colin's seat.

This has thrown Colin into a relative frenzy of activity. He stepped up his work as Chair of the All Party Committee on carbon emissions. He ensured the circulation of a report that he was knocked unconscious off his bicycle in Trafalgar Square. The "unconscious" bit led to him being accused of exaggeration by the web columnist Guy Fawkes and the Independent.

The Independent also reported a frosty confrontation between the two in the House of Commons dining room. The newspaper went on to speculate whether Colin was offered a knighthood (and was holding out for the House of Lords) for standing down.

There was some speculation in the media that Ed Balls would be going for other seats in West Yorkshire but the MPs, particularly my good friend George Mudie, responded vigorously to such suggestions. In fact George's private comments are unprintable.

John Battle, MP for West Leeds, did subsequently announce he was not going to stand. This throws his seat open. However it appears that New Labour want an all-women short list which would probably be a shoo-in for New Labour Councillor Alison Lowe. Lowe achieved fame in the Leeds North East selection battle (see above) by famously not answering one question on foreign policy because her voters in Armley were more concerned with the price of bread. An issue which she has since consistently failed to raise, unlike the famous Leeds fighter for women's rights Lady Ludd, who destroyed bread stalls when traders raised the prices too high.

There is another problem for Colin. He knows, as does every MP in West Yorkshire, that being offered a peerage is not the same thing as getting one. It is widely believed that Ed Balls' predecessor in Normanton was offered a gong to allow Ed in. However he is still waiting for the call. With the police investigating "cash for honours" and the proposed reform of the House of Lords, it is unlikely that promises will be delivered. There is probably a much better chance for Battle. He was a former government minister and he is already part of the establishment with his membership of the Privy Council.

The Energy Saving Trust

The newspapers have been carrying some weird adverts from an organisation called the Energy Saving Trust. The adverts claim that business is already committed to saving carbon emissions and now it is time for you to commit yourself to saving energy. This is a con trick.

Of course individuals should save energy. In many cases they are being forced to by the energy cartels putting up their prices. However individuals pay 3.8 times more tax on their carbon emissions than companies. The Energy Saving Trust is a New Labour front organisation (like its incestuous sister the Carbon Trust; see Umbrella 78) and is designed to increase this ratio. As a whole businesses in the UK have taken no steps beyond what they have been forced to by legislation to cut carbon emissions. Instead they use complex and opaque carbon trading schemes which allow them to increase emissions.

If anyone has to pay it is going to be the poor. A clear example is the way that middle class commentators attack budget airlines for increasing emissions. Airlines account for 1.6% of the world's total emissions and budget airlines are only a small proportion of this. Brown's response is to tax the passengers and let the airlines off the hook. He fails to tax fuel so failing to push for more efficient and less polluting aircraft. His real face is shown in his appointment of Sir Rod Eddington, the former chief executive of British Airways, to produce his transport review. This predictably rejected any substantial expansion of the rail network and did not call for any major changes to air travel. Instead the emphasis was on charging individual motorists for road use. The plan is to keep the poor off the roads.

The Energy Trust is a quango. It is a direct agent of Blair and Brown. Its board of directors is drawn mainly from the energy industry. Those that are not are professional members of the great and good who can be relied on to totally do the establishment's bidding. Over 97% of its £59 million budget comes from the taxpayer. Half the members of its board come from industry that pays in less than 1%. This is one of the clearest examples of how our money is being used by New Labour to divert our attention away from how to tackle the real criminals of climate change. If Colin Challen was serious about climate change he would set out to expose and destroy the Energy Saving Trust.