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Written by Ron Noon at 05:55 on Thursday, May 07th 2015
“Homes, health education and social security, these are your birthright.” Nye Bevin.
There’s a myriad of issues that influence how we vote but as I stood in the Polling Station at Booker Avenue Junior School, there was decidedly only one, containing three logo letters that have been systematically and insidiously abused by this shameless ConDem Government. They symbolise our once universal public healthcare system, the NHS. It is that same NHS and it’s Liverpool Royal Hospital Intensive Care Unit with it’s wonderful doctors, nurses, cleaners and carers that has kept my beloved wife Gail alive this last month and given my family and friends some hope that she will eventually pull through from the totally random but potentially fatal stroke she suffered on the evening of April 7th.
All my teaching, all the public history research, all the sugar blogs and involvement with the boys and girls from the whitestuff, has been supported and lovingly encouraged by my Gail and our four wonderful children, Matthew, Luke, Ben and Jessica. It is only now that Gail is stable in the High Dependency Unit and after brilliant caring nurses have “dictated” that my visits are restricted to “official” visiting times, (ending my overnight stopovers with Gail) that I can write these words down. I hope that these little black markers on the screen convey some of the passion that my family feel for protecting an NHS that ought to remain as an example to the world, and cease to be threatened by the despicable privatised dreams of Lynton Crosby and his Tory party privateers.
Gail’s dad’s generation would ask “is this what we fought the war for” to see the jewel in the crown of the People’s Peace settlement, the National Health Service that cares for all citizens, when needed, free of charge, funded by taxes and national insurance, run like a supermarket after being invaded by for-profit corporations? Are those three wonderful letters, NHS to be reduced to a badge on Jeremy Hunt’s lapel? Small wonder that the aggressively acerbic playwright Dennis Potter declared after calling his cancer Rupert, (no friend of the owner of the SUN) that the trouble with words and letters is that you don’t always know whose mouths they’ve been in before!
NHS in the mouths of the Tories and Lynton Crosby that so called master of the political dark arts, the man behind the efforts to get this contemptible Government re-elected today, are merely modulations of sound that convey no meaning, no significant reality, NO HOPE. I’m sorry my Gail, but these privateers are farting through the wrong orifice, and that is why I theatrically asked at the Polling Station a couple of hours back whether I could register a proxy vote for you today? I did not elaborate about the fact that you are fighting for recovery in the High Dependency Unit in the Royal but I just wanted to say it was only because you were ill that you were not there with me. I knew when the young teller called his supervisor that it was patently not possible but I wanted an official response so that I could declare that my vote was always for you anyway. It would be a shared vote, like our shared lives, for the NHS that only Labour can defend from the venal Tory “souls” who only ever worship mammon.
Viva my Gail. Viva the NHS. Viva our friends and family on the BOYS AND GIRLS FROM THE WHITESTUFF site.
Vote for my Gail and the defence of the NHS.
REAL TIME IS 13.10 hrs
Visiting time starts 1400 hrs. I’ll tell Gail about this when I get into the Royal. We’ve got to talk and stimulate her back to full recovery. Labour represents decency and the protection of what she and I cherish, a just and fair society.