Letter from London, January 2011

This month's London overview from Paul Coleman, London correspondent.

The year 2011 began with Mayor Boris Johnson announcing that visitors to London will see a huge, aqua-marine blue cockerel placed on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. 
I suppose the mega-cockerel confirms London welcomes bizarre artistic ideas. An assessment of world cities by British Council researchers declared London is the most "open" city, even ahead of New York, chiefly because the capital's businesses find it easy to hire foreign labour. 
   Migrants enjoy good health services and education, the researchers claimed. London is also relatively safe. Many Londoners aren't convinced though about the dubious benefits of foreign labour - as it's mainly cheap labour. 
   Foreign or home-grown bankers in the City of London are also bagging further huge bonuses despite creating havoc throughout the economy thanks to their irresponsible institutional gambling with our deposits. Instead of making the bankers pay for the massive budget deficit they've caused, a coalition government is making ordinary people pay through imminent public spending cuts to education, health and police services. 

    Unemployment is rising. Workers over 50 are already being culled at a faster rate than their younger counterparts by many of London's 32 boroughs. Businesses can't take on new staff as the banks, bailed out by taxpayers, are refusing to extend new or existing credit.

   The coalition's health 'reforms' are set to prise open the fragile yet beloved National Health Service to unfettered price competition by private suppliers and to European Union competition law. Some fear state-run hospitals will go bust.

   Decent homes are priced beyond the range of most working people. Few socially rented homes are being built. Private rents are rising. Tenants seek flatmates through 'speed flat-mating'. Hostels face closure. More homeless people struggle against the winter cold on West End streets outside properties owned by over-leveraged mortgagees who can no longer repay their colossal loans.

   
Is London safe? Yes, definitely, on most streets, in most areas. However, counter-terrorist sources inside Britain's security services, based at Thames House, raised the terror threat level to "severe", implying a terror attack is "highly likely". A friend of mine said he wouldn't be taking his family to Stratford in 2012 to watch any of the Olympic Games as he fears a terror attack. 

   Nagging doubts like these are fuelled by the ongoing inquest into the terror attacks on 7 July 2005. Police constable Christopher Mitchell recalled making a makeshift splint for Mark Beck, who lost his right leg in the Tavistock Square bomb blast that killed 13 people and the bomber. "We used Sellotape and some bits of wood we found on the road," said Mitchell.

   Don't get the wrong idea. Life in London in 2011 trundles on offering equal measures of typical hum-drum routine and famous vibrancy. Tourists crowd the sightseeing hot spots. Pubs and clubs remain lively. However, it's the future, both immediate and long-term, that worries most people. 

   As for Boris' cockerel - well, the big bird won't be plinthed until 2013. By that time, Boris himself might be politically cock-a-doodle-dooed. Boris seems to be running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, trying to be seen to speak up for London whilst cringing to doff a boffish cap to his axe-wielding coalition government allies. Ken Livingstone, London's inaugural mayor and Boris' arch-rival, has already started campaigning in south London's suburbs for next year's mayoral election. 

   Apparently, the cockerel doesn't reflect our 'true blue' Tory Mayor but symbolises  'regeneration, awakening and strength'. If 2011 does prove to be the year of savage cuts, London's economy and social fabric will need much regeneration and strengthening over the next ten years.

Paul Coleman, London, January 2011

Doctor, just give me the bad news

My friend’s knee was so painfully swollen she could barely walk. “I might just sit in A&E and see if they’ll treat me,” she told me.

Her General Practitioner had just said she might have to wait up to 18 weeks just to see a specialist. “I’m not even allowed to recommend that you have a scan,” said the GP. “Each scan costs the National Health Service £400 so they don’t allow doctors like me to make that decision for our patients.”

The frustrated doctor explained that the emasculation of GPs is just another way that the NHS is being “deliberately rundown” in London. “Soon, the NHS will only be for emergencies,” the doctor said. “It’s being rundown so people will be forced to take out private health insurance.”

The doctor’s bleak outlook is strongly echoed in London’s NHS On The Brink, a report launched today (20 January) by the London Regional Council of the British Medical Association. Health expert and report author John Lister warns record numbers of beds will be cut and hospitals closed if a new government squeezes NHS spending.

In this part of London, - Enfield -  NHS hospitals have struggled for years whilst the Nuffield, Kings Oak and Priory private hospitals have enjoyed sustained growth. Highlands Hospital used to boast its own A&E and other specialist services but the hospital has long since gone, replaced by a bleak, shoddy housing development with a ubiquitous Sainsbury. Grovelands, a temporary hospital for wounded British soldiers, is now a private clinic that sheltered the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as he hid from justice in 1998.

But the biggest stink has come from the decision to downgrade the 24/7 A&E service at Chase Farm Hospital along with children and maternity services. Despite concerted protest from local people, including two councillors elected to Enfield Council on a Save Chase Farm ticket, the downgrade goes on.

Lister’s BMA report says Private Finance Initiative projects, like the new Queen’s Hospital in Romford, will throttle London’s health budgets for the next two decades. Building Queen’s Hospital cost £238 million but Barking Havering and Redbridge Trust will have forked out £2.28 billion by the time the PFI contract ends in 2042. Worse still, this isn’t the most expensive of the twenty NHS PFI’s across London.

The BMA concludes London’s healthcare is heading towards a “major financial crisis” and planned cuts and closures are the result of  “secret discussions, plans and briefings that have been organized by NHS London”.  

NHS London say their decisions are “clinically led” and taken with “full consultation with local people”. An NHS spokesman responded to the BMA’s report: “To give people leading expert care we also need to centralise some services.”

Nevertheless, London’s NHS On The Brink contains a dire warning so I’ll be taking a closer look at the report's implications in future postings.

Paul Coleman, London, January 2010.