Monday 12^th July 2010

WIELDING THE AXE

 The Con-Dem coalition cuts were supposed to be put off until next year, we were promised.

But it doesn’t feel like that for those of us who are concerned about health services in Inverclyde.

This week, the Royal College of Nursing revealed the NHS in Scotland faces £250 million worth of cuts in this financial year.

For us locally, the Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board has to find savings of £54 million and cut more than 550 nursing and midwifery posts.

If this is what we have to face up to when Scotland’s enjoys its biggest settlement since devolution, God save us next year when George Osborne’s takes his axe to our budgets

Yet the health secretary Nicola Sturgeon repeated her claims this week that she can do all this without cutting frontline services, forcing compulsory redundancies or impacting patient care

It is barely credible and it is time she came clean with the public about what she is planning.

We already know that midwife numbers are being cut, putting our maternity services under threat.

And we now know surgical beds are being lost at the Inverclyde Royal Hospital.

The centralisation agenda we resisted so effectively as a community is now looming ominously over us again.

Make no mistake; this is the biggest test of the cabinet secretary’s political career.

She must accept her responsibility that local services and patient care cannot be allow to fall under the axe, whoever wields it.

If the health secretary fails, there will be consequences for us all and it will more than just her reputation which suffers.

Monday 5^th July 2010

NOT IF BUT WHEN

This won’t go away.

That was my pledge to the scores of campaigners who made it through to Edinburgh to watch the Damian’s Law amendment being debated in the Scottish Parliament.

Although we lost the vote by the tightest of margins, there is no doubt that we won the popular argument.

Those campaigners truly believed they could achieve political change from the ground up and my message to them would echo Barack Obama’s famous slogan – yes we can.

After all, this started with one ordinary man dealing with the tragic and senseless loss of his son by starting a petition for tough action on crime.

John Muir’s petition had people queuing up in the streets to sign up and it led to a summit in the Scottish Parliament, found the backing of the justice committee and came to a vote in the chamber this week.

Only two votes prevented us from achieving an extraordinary result.

It is an amazing story but one which is far from finished and the fight continues.

The Scottish Government in Edinburgh this week prevented us from taking action that would make our communities safer.

In fact, they didn’t even attempt to meet us halfway and by the end of the day they had actually made the situation worse by abolishing short prison terms in favour of community service.

This will not inspire confidence among people who have genuine fears that the perceived rights of a criminal minority are more important than those of the innocent majority.

John Muir has given a voice to those communities across Scotland and I am confident people power will win the day.