Open Letter to Shropshire, Telford & Powys MPs: Halt Future Fit

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The following letter has been sent to all the local MPs urging them to request the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to halt Future Fit. The Secretary of State has had the decision referred to him by Telford & Wrekin Council. He then referred the decision to his Independent Reconfiguration Panel (IRP) to come up with recommendations. Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin Defend Our NHS made its own 124-page submission to the IRP which is referenced in the letter and may be downloaded from here.

Dear <Local MP>

On the 18^th February, Telford and Wrekin Councillors voted unanimously to refer the decision on Future Fit to Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. That referral is now with the Independent Reconfiguration Panel.

The reality is that Future Fit will lead to worse healthcare not just for the people of Telford and Wrekin, but for Shropshire and Powys people too. It is also clear that Future Fit cannot solve the financial crisis in our local NHS, but will exacerbate it.

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The national direction of travel in the NHS – rightly – is towards integration, and a reduction in hospital admissions through improved prevention and community-based services. These strands underpin the Five Year Forward View and the NHS Long Term Plan.

Future Fit is an entirely acute-centric project. In October 2015, the initial whole system approach was downgraded to become SaTH’s Sustainable Services Plan. The proposals were written by SaTH, were solely about acute hospital care, and were far, far removed from national priorities. You will recall that the public consultation was not about a vision of whole system healthcare, but was just about which town would have the Emergency Centre and which would have the Planned Care Centre. The late additions to Future Fit on community initiatives show just how embryonic this work is. The Future Fit approach is hopelessly out of step with nationally recognised good practice.

Our detailed submission[i] to the Independent Reconfiguration Panel (IRP) has been accepted for consideration as part of the Future Fit review. The submission analyses the history of Future Fit, the current Future Fit proposals, and the core components of an alternative to Future Fit. We request that you take the time to look at the full submission, but we include brief examples here:

• Original Future Fit plans stressed the need for joined up healthcare, with funding for community services and a transformed prevention and wellbeing agenda. There was a strong focus on local services: a network of rural Urgent Care Centres, Community Hubs and Local Planned Care Centres, and an enhanced role for community hospitals.[ii] These key strands have been lost.
• Future Fit treats access as an afterthought – but the evidence base shows that access to healthcare is strongly related to patient outcomes (for emergency[iii] and non-emergency[iv] care alike). Centralisation makes little sense in an area four times the size of Greater London. There will be an immense impact here on rural communities in Shropshire and Powys (as well as emergency patients and their relatives in Telford and Wrekin, of course).
• We have strong concerns over the clinical model proposed in Future Fit, many of them raised with us by clinicians. Neither Urgent Care Centre is likely to be able to safely treat 65% of A&E patients. Transfer arrangements from Telford to Shrewsbury that consist of dialling 999 and waiting for an ambulance carry avoidable risk.[v] The Planned Care Centre is to have no Critical Care facility and no out-of-hours anaesthetic cover, again creating risk.[vi]
• We are in a period of escalating demand[vii] for A&E and hospital beds – yet Future Fit closes an A&E, reduces the bed base, and cuts the number of staff. The numbers don’t add up – and we will have a single Emergency Department and a single acute hospital that are not fit for purpose.
• The finances do not stack up either.[viii] SaTH now expects to make cuts of £18.9m this year and over £48m by 2023/24.[ix] The new proposal to increase the number of A&E nurses is both overdue and welcome – but this small investment is far outweighed by an escalating financial crisis that will necessarily impact on patient care. And across Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, we face NHS cuts of £51.6m this year, with a further £53m over the coming four years.[x] NHS England funding arrangements let down smaller hospital trusts like SaTH; Shropshire CCG, with its rural and older population; and Telford and Wrekin CCG, with above average health need but short-changed by £17m against the NHS England average funding.[xi] As Telford and Wrekin CCG cuts hospice funding and funding for services supporting older people, people with dementia, and people with disabilities, we have a glimpse of how NHS cuts will cause real harm.

We need two things to happen now. One is the replacement of Future Fit by a whole system approach, planned and coordinated, with prevention and care closer to home at its heart (as opposed to being underfunded post hoc ‘bolt-ons’). The second is a serious review of the NHS England allocations and national tariff systems and how these result in funding that cannot meet the health needs of people in our area.

Without these things, we risk an unmanaged slide into chaos: into £11m a year recurrent payments for new hospital buildings that have too few staff and too few beds; a crumbling community infrastructure; an acute ‘solution’ that cannot cope with escalating demand; and community and prevention initiatives that are about self-care, information, and sign-posting instead of high quality clinical care.

Local people deserve something better than this. This isn’t a beauty contest between Shrewsbury and Telford that Shrewsbury has ‘won’. This is about worse care for all of us: Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, and Powys alike. Please take the time to look at the detail of Future Fit, and please use your influence with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to have this project scrutinised in detail. And please also raise with Matt Hancock the anomalies of funding that let down small hospitals, rural CCGs with older populations, and – for unclear reasons – Telford and Wrekin CCG. Good healthcare should not be a luxury reserved for people who live in big cities.

Please note that this is an open letter that will be shared with local media.

Many thanks

Gill George, Chair

Julia Evans, Secretary

Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin Defend Our NHS

References

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[i] Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin Defend Our NHS. Future Fit: Unfit to Progress. 1^st May 2019. https://shropshiredefendournhs.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/ff-irp-submission-v1.0.pdf   

[ii] IRP Submission. 2. Future Fit: A History of Discontinuity and Chaos

[iii] IRP Submission. 3.7 Access and Emergency Care

[iv] IRP Submission. 3.8 Non-Emergency Access

[v] IRP Submission. 4.2 Urgent Care Centres/ Urgent Treatment Centres

[vi] IRP Submission. 4.3 The Planned Care Centre at Princess Royal Hospital

[vii] IRP Submission. 5.1.4. An unparalleled escalation in demand

[viii] IRP Submission. 5.3 Financial Sustainability

[ix] SaTH. Financial Strategy. Board papers for 30^th May 2019. https://www.sath.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/190530-25-Trusts-Financial-Strategy.pdf

[x] Telford and Wrekin CCG. System Plan. 14 May 2019. https://www.telfordccg.nhs.uk/who-we-are/publications/ccg-governance-board/governance-board-papers/2019/may-2019/5831-09-system-operating-plan/file

[xi] IRP Submission. 8.12. NHS Funding: Time for a re-think

A glimmer of hope for the NHS

“The NHS is our preferred provider”.

These are the words of Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Health. A speech to the King’s Fund has been followed by a letter to TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber, and an agreement of the Social Partnership Forum (representing NHS unions and employers). The documents are here.

This is extraordinary. After years of a deliberate and wilful assault on a public NHS,  this looks like being a real policy shift. Yes, all of us would have written a harder and sharper document, without the prevarications and the loopholes – but nevertheless there are requirements here that make it far harder for NHS ‘commissioners’ to hand over services to big business.

The  furious response from former Secretary of State Alan Milburn highlights the extent to which this is a break with the past. Milburn did his damndest to smash up the NHS when he ran it – and now makes a pile of money as an advisor to the private sector firms muscling in on healthcare. If Burnham was just coming out with the usual New Labour drivel, Milburn wouldn’t be so angry.

Trade unionists and campaigners have a responsibility to seize this opportunity. We’re on the brink of losing primary care now – all those vital community health services that make up over 80% of our NHS. Burnham claims he doesn’t want it to happen. Fine – let’s hold him to account. Let’s hold to account, too, the army of eager privateers in the Department of Health and the Strategic Health Authorities, and the scummy little bureaucrats and empire builders who hold so many senior management positions in the NHS, and the Labour councillors on Health Scrutiny Committees who have been unwilling to defend local services. Let’s get the message out to the army of MPs who are terrified of losing their seats: “Stop the break-up of the NHS”.

Why is Labour doing this? Unison’s Mike Jackson claims it’s ‘partnership’. I think it’s a desperate government flailing around for votes. Actually it doesn’t matter. We’ve got a window of opportunity to save the NHS. Cynicism is understandable – but a mistake if it gets in the way of a fight. Now’s the time to throw every effort into building the biggest, boldest and loudest campaign we can deliver.

McKinsey Madness

Apologies for a quiet few months. I’ve been seeing the NHS from another angle, having acquired myself a diagnosis of ‘syringomyelia’. This is a rather obscure spinal condition – relatively common in spaniels, apparently, but quite rare in people. You know you’ve got something a bit unusual when you go and see your GP to discuss treatment options, and she says, ‘Now tell me what that is’.

So how has the NHS been, so far? Not perfect, but not bad either. I’ve met some highly skilled health professionals. I’ve had access to MRI scans when I’ve needed them. I’ve had onward referrals to appropriate specialists – so far, as and when required. I’ve been treated with respect and courtesy by virtually every NHS worker I’ve encountered.

The problems, predictably enough, are around privatisation, and the drive towards cost-cutting that you get when you ‘marketise’ the NHS. I’ve had appointments at one hospital that is struggling with a massive PFI debt and pushing through savage cuts as a direct result. It shows. I’ve also talked to clinicians (at the same hospital) who have told me of the growing clinical risks as managers set targets that cannot be met without compromising patient care.

These are not failures of the NHS. This is an important point. The NHS works, saves lives, and transforms the quality of peoples’ lives, and does this as a matter of routine, every single day. The failures here are of Government policy, which continues to be one of dismantling the NHS and destroying the values and ethos that make the NHS work.

The latest bit of madness is, of course, the Government-commissioned McKinsey report – out since March, but our pals in New Labour have been sitting on it. McKinsey is a particularly vile management consultancy that has made a mint out of the public sector. The HSJ summary is here. McKinsey recommend axing 10% of NHS jobs to achieve £20 billion savings.

Coincidentally, £20 billion is the estimated cost of the Government’s loopy privatisation schemes. If there are savings to be made, perhaps stopping the dash for privatisation might be a better bet than imposing massive cuts in clinical care. Even better, maybe we could just invest the £20 billion in patient care, and have an NHS we can all be proud of.

There’s one NHS cut I would welcome. Around £350 million of our money was spent last year on management consultants – the greedy parasites who feed off the NHS. The result? Reports that aren’t fit to be used as toilet paper.

Dial-a-Ride: Right to strike

I had the pleasant surprise last Friday of bumping into a picket line on my way to work. The strikers were Unite members at London Dial-a-Ride – the service that offers door-to-door transport for very elderly people and for people with disabilities who cannot access public transport easily.

I stopped and had a chat with the workers on the picket line. Nobody goes on strike (and loses money) for fun – people are generally pushed to breaking point before they even consider strike action, and are typically absolutely right to use the strongest weapon that workers have.

That was certainly the case at London Dial-a-Ride. The Unite convenor told me about the background to the dispute. The booking and scheduling system was centralised a couple of years ago, with a new computer system doing the work that used to be done at local level. The system simply doesn’t work. Users are left hanging on the phone trying to book a call, can’t book rides for the times they need them, or can’t book rides at all.

This isn’t about minor inconvenience; this is about quality of life. I was told about the real distress of service users.  It might be the highlight of someone’s week to go to the shops with a friend, or to go to a social club at a regular time, with people they know, knowing that they can rely on a ride there and back. ‘Flexibility’ isn’t an option when it comes to the things that are keeping you sane and making life worth living – or, for very practical reasons, when a journey is to a medical apointment, or fitted in around other health care  and social care arrangements.

It isn’t just the service users who are distressed. It’s the drivers who take on responsibility for a failing system and who swap rides when they can in a desperate effort to meet peoples’ needs. The convenor told me about the drivers who are in tears when they let down Maisie who always does her shopping with her neighbour on Wednesday mornings, or Bill who always goes to his club on a Thursday afternoon.

There’s a human cost to systems that don’t work. It’s astonishing that a new system can be put in without proper testing to ensure it will work, and downright bizarre that problems persist a couple of years after the thing went live. The grotesque mismanagement increasingly leaves the future of the whole service in jeopardy.

Not content with mismanaging the service to users, senior managers seem to have decided that it’s the workforce who are the enemy. There’s a headlong gallop towards a bullying, top-down and intimidatory style of management. Existing agreements are simply being torn up. Grievances are stalled, because managers don’t want to progress them. People aren’t allowed union representation until disciplinary actions become formal – a grudging compliance with the bare legal minimum, and an approach that is punitive and anti-union. There’s no evidence at all of very committed and hard-working drivers abusing sick leave arrangements – but that hasn’t stopped managers imposing a ‘get tough’ approach to absolutely legitimate sickness and to time off for hospital appointments. There’s also a very direct attack on Unite, with facility time for stewards being slashed. All of this is a massive attack on collective bargaining in Dial-a-Ride. Workers are much easier to push around if they’re isolated individuals, without the protection of a union that negotiates for everyone.

Were London Dial-a-Ride workers right to go on strike last Friday? Of course they were. Will they be right to take the dispute forward, if members back this? Again, of course they will be. The needs of Dial-a-Ride users and Dial-a-Ride workers seem pretty much the same here: a right to be treated with respect and decency.

Victory at Visteon

News emerged at the end of last week of what looks like a significant victory for the Visteon workers. I’ve written about this dispute  before.  Around 600 workers were sacked at the end of March with a few minutes notice – and the employer then denied them even the pensions and the redundancy pay they were due.

Visteon workers used to be employed by Ford until 2000, and were on Ford contracts. When it came to the sackings, though, Ford managers simply said, ‘Nothing to do with us’.

The workers quite rightly fought back, with occupations and pickets of their plants to prevent the bosses moving machinery out. What really swung it was the threat of secondary action by Ford workers. There was a serious and growing mood amongst the Visteon workforce to take the fight to Ford, and picket out Ford plants. This could have cost Ford millions.

The outcome? Ford has been forced to acknowledge its responsibilities to the workers. They’ve been offered redundancy payments totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds, with some workers likely to receive as much as £40,000. They haven’t saved their jobs – but they have won a significant victory nevertheless.

There are lessons to be learned from this. When the Visteon workers occupied their workplaces, this was of course against the law. The threatened solidarity action by Ford workers would have course have been against the law. It is very, very difficult – in the context of Thatcher’s anti-union laws, perpetuated by Blair and Brown – to win an industrial dispute and stay within the law. The economic crisis means that workers are likely to face an absolute onslaught of pay cuts, axed pensions, and mass job loss. Our unions can either meekly obey Tory law – or can put their members first.

The Visteon workers didn’t win by asking nicely, or by waiting in the vain hope that a Labour Government might start treating ordinary workers with respect. They fought back, and they were right to do so. Their victory sends an important message to other workers as redundancies soar. When they come for our jobs, we can fight back and we can win.

Labour may be toast – let’s make sure we’re not!

At least two papers carried the same joke as commentary on Wednesday’s budget. They captioned the ubiquitous picture of Alistair Darling and his wife having breakfast together before he heads off to make his budget speech. Mrs Darling says, ‘Toast, dear?‘. Our Al looks up from the Financial Times and replies, ‘Yes, we are’. It made me laugh – but only briefly.

The reality is that Labour is finished. ‘Snowball’s chance in hell’ is the phrase that springs to mind. Labour will get smashed at the next election for the simple reason it has betrayed its core voters, again and again and again. The UK’s biggest trade unions have allowed the Labour Party to betray workers (and pensioners, and children, and single parents, and the unemployed, and people who need affordable housing, and so on and so forth) on the basis that however bad the Labour Government gets, they’re not quite as bad as the Tories. By letting Blair and Brown off the hook, our union leaders may have effectively signed Labour’s death warrant.

The miserable political bankruptcy of Labour has been matched by the rising tide of sleaze. The last few months have been extraordinarily reminiscent of the dying days of John Major’s Tory Government, before Labour swept to victory in 1997.

A few days ago I warned of the likelihood of massive cuts in public spending lying just ahead. Analysis of the budget is starting to confirm this. Today’s Guardian carries genuinely frightening predictions, with two articles outlining the crisis into which our public services will plunge. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has picked up on a £45 billion gap in Darling’s plans, and predicts the deepest cuts since the 1970s. The IFS analysis is of an average 2.3% a year cut across government departments from 2011/12 onwards.

The second article reports on responses to the budget.  The Lib Dems’ analysis is of a fall in NHS spending of £2.3 billion from 2010/11 onwards, with a further £600 million to be taken from the Department for Children, Schools and Families. I don’t for one second trust the Lib Dems, but commentators with considerably more integrity make the same warnings. The Trade Union Co-ordinating Group, representing nine unions that are independent of Labour, believes that the Government intends disastrous public spending cuts that will dwarf anything ever attempted by Margaret Thatcher. John McDonnell MP says, ‘These cuts are catastrophic. People are worried by the combination of cuts and asset sales and privatisation… there will be massive cuts in public expenditure. If you combine the cuts with privatisation this is on a scale that has never been seen before’. 

This is a warning that has to be taken seriously.

There are two ways forward. One is a descent into savage attacks on workers that are not met with resistance – and bitterness and despair can provide a fertile breeding ground for the Nazi BNP. The other way forward for us is that workers organise and fight back – black and white, gay and straight, women and men, public and private sector – all of us standing together and demanding that we do not pay the price for the bosses’ crisis.

There are obvious stepping stones towards this. The Visteon dispute shows that closures and redundancies can be fought. We have to do everything we can to ensure that this very winnable dispute ends in a clear victory for the workers. The key to winning this one is practical solidarity. We also have the Unite Demonstration for Jobs in Birmingham on 16^th May – an opportunity for a massive show of strength by rank and file trade unionists. We should aim to have victorious Visteon workers heading up the march!

And crucially, we need to demand that trade union leaders do their job and lead.  If we don’t have a serious, organised defence of jobs, pay and public services, the consequences for workers are close to unthinkable.

Got five minutes spare before 30th April?

There’s an important leaflet here from Keep Our NHS Public.

This is about the ‘Co-operation and Competition Panel’ – a fancy name for a body that will allow the private sector to overturn local decisions to keep NHS services publicly provided and publicly accountable.

It’s astonishing that a Government that is so discredited and so unpopular remains determined to destroy the welfare state and the NHS. Brown’s ambition is seemingly to go down in history as the man who succeeded where Margaret Thatcher failed.

There’s a consultation exercise going on now around the Co-operation and Competition Panel. It’s not intended to be a real exercise in democracy, as this might actually mean asking people if they want their NHS to be sold off to the profiteers. However, it does no harm at all to respond along the lines suggested by KONP. If you have a spare five minutes before 30th April, give it a go.

The consultation documents are here  if you can’t access them from the KONP leaflet.

Massive public spending cuts just around the corner?

I can’t keep track of the number of media reports I’ve seen in the last few weeks calling for public spending cuts. This is rapidly becoming the new orthodoxy, with well-paid journalists, right-wing think tanks and neo-liberal politicians all joining together in reactionary chorus.

A quote here from Reform, a grubby little outfit that claims to be “an independent think-tank whose mission is to set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity”. That’s prosperity for a handful of the super-rich then, I guess. Reform says that “in order to put Britain’s economy on the right path, public spending cuts must be considered and traditionally ‘unthinkable’ areas such as the NHS and defence cannot be exempt from the discussion”.  Anyone who’s naïve enough to think that the Lib-Dems offer a progressive alternative to Labour or the Tories might like to note that Reform is launching its pre-Budget report with Vince Cable as the keynote speaker.

An even less subtle but equally grubby little outfit, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, is also calling for public spending cuts. The Taxpayers’ Alliance claims that there is “a very severe divide” opening up between public and private sectors, with state employees enjoying better pay, pensions and job security.

The bosses’ paper the Financial Times and the right-wing  Daily Telegraph are going out of their way to promote this view, as are many other newspapers. Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne is happy to provide the politics these rags are looking for. Osborne told the FT that the 1.1% a year expansion in public spending planned by Labour is not sustainable. He has threatened to renege on the (very poor) three year pay restraint deals forced through by Labour, and says the issue of ‘gold-plated’ public sector pensions will be swiftly addressed by a Tory Government. Eton and Oxford wasn’t it, George? Good to know you’re in touch with the concerns of ordinary people.

And what about Labour? Subdued murmurs of massive public spending cuts have been going on for a long while now – way before the multi-billion bail-out of the banks, even. However, the Government’s got so few people left who actually support them, they don’t necessarily want to drive away the few voters who doggedly cling on hoping for something better. The BBC suggests that spending cuts will be announced in a future comprehensive spending review, rather than in the forthcoming budget – and any spending review will presumably be delayed until after the European elections in June.

We’re already seeing the softening up attacks from Labour, though. When Brown calls for reform of MPs’  ‘gold plated pensions’ this sounds remarkably like step one towards Osborne’s wider attack on ‘gold plated pensions’ in the public sector. Brown’s hatred of decent public sector pensions is an open secret. And the budget may well include other attacks – an increase in National Insurance contributions, an increase in VAT, the reduction of tax relief on pension contributions and so on. Who gets clobbered by these things? Ordinary workers, obviously.

We’re left with a bit of a dilemma then. One way forward for trade unionists is to accept that all we can do is tail Labour. That means doing as little as possible while the Labour Government desperately flails about in its death throes, with union leaders trying hard to look the other way while the NHS gets privatised, the public sector as a whole is decimated, and all workers are made to pay the price for the bosses’ crisis. My belief is that our big unions like Unison and Unite have made far too many concessions so as not to embarrass Labour.

The other way is to fight back. The claimed divide between public and private sector workers is a completely false one – a fake argument designed to divide and rule. It’s in the interests of ALL workers that we have decent public services. It’s very obviously in the interests of all workers that all of us have jobs, fair pay, and a pension that won’t leave us destitute in old age. Workers have never got anything for free – the lesson of history is that we get what we fight for. We’re now facing the deepest recession since the 1930s. If we allow the ruling class to get away with it, our side will pay a very heavy price. The need for militant trade union organisation has never been clearer.

Hospital Chaplains: Doing a good job

Yesterday the National Secular Society demanded an end to the NHS funding of hospital chaplains. Coverage from the National Secular Society website is  here. There’s been a fair bit of press coverage on this, and the issue has also sparked debate within Unite.

I’ve been an atheist for the whole of my adult life. However, I think the National Secular Society has got it wrong on this one. It’s absolutely reasonable to expect district nurses to have enough respect for their patients that they don’t go around forcing prayer cards on them. Actually, it’s equally reasonable to respect the wishes of patients who choose to seek support from hospital chaplains.

As a senior trade unionist, I represent hospital chaplains. Many of them are members of Unite, and many are active trade unionists. Hospital chaplains are NHS workers – employed by the NHS on standard NHS terms and conditions. They’re subject to the same pressures as any other NHS worker. They’re multi-faith – hospital chaplains are drawn from most major faith groups in the UK. Their job isn’t to proselytise. They’re there to provide spiritual and pastoral care to patients and patients’ families. My consistent experience has been that they do so in an open and generous way, with no question of quizzing people about their faith or trying to convert them to a particular religion.

At times I’ve worked closely with hospital chaplains in my role as a speech and language therapist. I worked for a few years on a neonatal unit, with premature or seriously ill babies. I saw for myself the care and support given by hospital chaplains to the families of critically ill babies, and the way their care continued for the families who lost their babies. We have a target driven NHS these days. There’s no time for nurses to sit and talk to the mother of a dying child, or to someone who is fearful of their own death, or to the wife who has just lost a cherished husband. Hospital chaplains can, and do, and do so with enormous skill and commitment. Their employment represents an important strand of humanity in an NHS that is under attack.

Hospital chaplains have been seen as a soft target for management cuts in recent years. They deserve the solidarity and support of trade unionists. I would be very sorry indeed if we lost hospital chaplains. Hospitals would be poorer places without them.

Solidarity with the Visteon Occupation

I was at an inspiring meeting in North London last night – a solidarity meeting with the Visteon workers who are in occupation now.

On Tuesday last week, over 500 Visteon workers were sacked with a few minutes notice. They were told to clear their lockers and get out. Some of them had been employed there for more than 40 years. There was no warning, and no consultation. They were told there’s no money for redundancy pay, and they’ll get the statutory minimum. They didn’t even get their pay for the final week at work.

What did they do? At two of the three plants involved (Enfield and Belfast) they’ve gone into occupation.

Visteon was hived off by Ford back in 2000, but workers were told they were guaranteed Ford contracts for life. That would mean no compulsory redundancies. Instead, Ford is saying ‘Nothing to do with us’, while Visteon has simply dumped them. The workers are fighting for a settlement that treats them like human beings – either for the plants to stay open, or for a fair redundancy package.

There’s a jobs massacre going on – in construction, in finance, in manufacturing generally – and right at the sharp end of things, in car plants and in motor components plants like Visteon. Far too much of this is happening without a fightback.

That’s why it’s so brilliant to see the Visteon workers standing up for their right to be treated with respect, and sending out a message loud and clear, ‘Workers fight back’.

It was a privilege to hear the Visteon workers yesterday talking about their fight. They spoke of their absolute determination to keep going, of the practical problems of sleeping in shifts in a building with no heating and limited washing facilities, and of the confidence that widespread solidarity has given them.

The stakes are very high here. The convenor and deputy convenor were threatened with two year jail sentences at the High Court yesterday. There’s now a brief stalemate while talks take place. What a disgrace that we have a Government that allows workers to be sacked with a few minutes notice, but has no problem with those same workers being jailed for defending their jobs.

Check out the  video, and download the collection sheet. This is a fight that has to win. The job of trade unionists and socialists is to deliver the practical solidarity that can ensure that victory.