Labour Party poster. 1966

Jeremy Corbyn (via awed-frog)

Emma Rees (via policythinksandthings)

A message to my fellow lefties: Anytime anyone shouts you down for wanting to vote for Labour (or SNP, Green or LD, for that matter), don’t worry about having to defend yourself and your beliefs. Don’t argue, or start throwing around personal insults. Just listen to what they have to say. Be respectful, understanding and open-minded. Then, send ‘em this.

VOTE LABOUR ON JUNE 8th!

Labour can win this election - if we all join the fight

lads…………….. vote the tories out

Jeremy Corbyn speech at the Royal College of Nursing Annual Conference

***Check against delivery***

I want to thank you, and everyone in the nursing profession and in our National Health Service, for all the work that you do.  

Our politicians owe you a duty.

A duty to ensure you can work with dignity.

A duty to ensure that you are not held back from providing the best possible standard of service to all your patients.

Because I do understand the stress that so many of you go through every day. I talk frequently to local GPs in my own area, as well as nurses in my local hospital. And I have worked in the past in trade unions in the NHS.

So, I want to outline to you today what Labour wants to offer to you in the General Election.

We are ready to step in and save the NHS from the cuts and privatisation that happened over the last seven years.

Every day I ensure that our General Election team is fully aware of the importance of our national health service.

At our headquarters in London, the walls are decorated with the original poster from the 1940s saying ‘Labour’s health service covers everyone – and the Tories voted against it.’

Nothing embodies our campaign theme - ‘for the many not the few’ - better than the NHS.

Universal, life-long health care, free at the point of need.

However, our NHS is actually being dismantled by stealth.

Over the past seven years, our NHS has been driven into crisis after crisis.

A&E departments are struggling to cope. Waiting lists soaring and, as we saw last week, Tory cuts have exposed patient services to cyberattack.

I want to pay a huge tribute to how all NHS staff have responded to this terrible cyber attack. The stress you must have faced trying to keep patients safe must have been intense, and still is.

This was just another example of the extraordinary lengths you go to every day to keep our country healthy.

I was talking to junior doctors and nurses at the James Paget Hospital in Great Yarmouth on Saturday. Like many others, all its operations had been cancelled because of the cyber attack.

We must invest in our NHS to protect all the systems so we’re not held to ransom by criminals who are doing us all damage and doing us all down. You stepped up to try to protect our patients. Thank you very much.

Our NHS is under threat from privatisation, which was brought in by the Health & Social Care Act. The privatisation has gone on a huge scale - £13 billion of taxpayers’ money was handed over last year to private companies to profit from NHS services.

Aneurin Bevan once said of the NHS…

“It will last only as long as there’s folk with faith left to fight for it.”

I say to everyone, remember those prescient words from Aneurin Bevan.

Throughout my life, I’ve been involved in campaigns to support and defend the NHS. And I know there are millions of people in this country who are utterly determined to defend the principle of an NHS, free at the point of use for everybody in our society.

We’re here in Nye’s legacy.

In hospitals, health centres, and communities all across the land there are thousands of us.

People for whom working for the NHS is a privilege and a pleasure.

Like so many in public service everywhere.

People work in it and believe in the principles of the NHS.

A service like no other.

Not a service which checks your bank balance before it checks your blood pressure.

I’m always astonished when I talk to people from the United States. They lack what we have, which is one of the most civilised things about our country; our NHS. And we are utterly determined to defend it.  

Britain is not being run for the many, it’s not being run for the majority. And across our country people are being held back.

If you’re a student nurse without a bursary, doing a second job to make ends meet; you’re being held back.

If you worry about your children because they can’t get together the deposit for a home or afford the rent; then you are being held back.

If you manage a ward in a hospital and can’t free up beds because of the cuts in social care then you have a problem; the Government is holding you back – stopping you from doing properly the job you were trained and are proud to do.

Britain is the sixth richest country in the world - it cannot be right that we have these problems.

It cannot be right that trained nurses are leaving the profession for other jobs.

It cannot be right that tax giveaways for the very rich and big business have been put in front of the needs of funding our NHS, Social Care and proper treatment for all NHS staff.

The RCN, your union, has found that nursing shortages have doubled in just four years.

We could have 40,000 fewer nurses than we need by 2026.

Your pay has fallen 14 per cent in real terms since 2010, and you don’t work any fewer hours for it.

That is the Tories’ record.

I wish there could be a public debate on this record with Teresa May.

Did you hear her on a radio phone in last week?

A doctor from Leeds called Romena told her that she was considering quitting after 12 years of service because of “crippling frontline staff shortages which have worsened as a result of the government’s failure to invest properly in the NHS”

Romena asked why Jeremy Hunt was reappointed since he’d demoralised the entire workforce.

Theresa May simply dodged the questions

She doesn’t want to recognise the truth.

Or the real scale of the crisis.

Theresa May isn’t listening and doesn’t care.

She herself called the Tories the nasty party.

And now she’s trying to masquerade as someone who cares about working people.

She’s taking us for fools.

Theresa May and her Tory Government have failed to stand up for the hundreds of thousands of workers not being paid the minimum wage

She has failed to tackle zero hours’ contracts and employment agency malpractices.

She’s done nothing for the thousands of workers who have been unfairly treated but can’t afford to pursue a claim because of tribunal fees - introduced in the first place by the Tories.

They are still the nasty party.

And if they win this election, the people of Britain are in for some nasty surprises.

Can you imagine what the NHS would be like in five years’ time if we carried on with this underfunding, with this level of demoralisation? It would be unrecognisable: a national health service in name, cut back, broken up and plundered by private corporations.

I want to make it very clear, we are determined to put the NHS back on its feet. To move towards a National Social Care Service to give everyone the care and dignity they deserve and to finally make parity of esteem for mental and physical health a reality.

I feel very passionately about the NHS, but I also feel very passionately about mental health services and social care services.

We have one million people not getting the social care they need. Many, often women, give up jobs to care for elderly relatives because the service isn’t there to do it for them.

And in our mental health services, 6,000 nurses have lost their jobs in the past seven years. One in four of us will experience a mental health crisis in our life time, but we’ll have to wait six months before receiving any treatment.

I’m determined to realise parity of esteem between mental and physical health and to ensure properly funded mental health services across our country. 

Today we are pledging an extra £7.4 billion a year for the NHS throughout the next Parliament, including £2 billion annually to modernise buildings and IT systems.

This funding settlement will allow us to:

·         Guarantee access to treatment within 18 weeks, cutting one million from NHS waiting lists by the end of the Parliament. 

·         Ensure those needing A&E services are seen within four hours, helping another million people each year.

·         Deliver the Cancer Care Strategy for England in full by 2020, helping 2.5 million people living with cancer.

·         Create a new £500m Winter Pressures Fund to protect patients from the problems we saw earlier this year.

This is Labour’s New Deal for NHS Patients.

It will give NHS staff the support they need – and deserve - to give the best possible service to patients.

And we will guarantee that level of service.

We will ensure the standards the Tories have failed to deliver – and to which patients are legally entitled - are met under Labour.

But we also recognise that great services depend on retaining staff by rewarding them properly.

Everyone in the NHS goes above and beyond every day, and your ballot result yesterday showed how angry and frustrated your members are after a 14% cut in real pay under the Tories.

We will not put you in that position.

We will lift the public sector pay cap.

And hand back decisions on pay to an independent review body.

We want nurses to be paid a decent wage.

And we will fund training. We will restore the bursaries for nurses - the vital funding that the Tories chose to end.

Last week I was in Worcester talking to nurses, who said they would not have been able to go into the nursing profession if they hadn’t received their bursaries.

I am determined to bring back the nurses’ bursary so there isn’t a nursing crisis in five years’ time. Let’s invest for the future.

This election will define the future of the NHS as no other has.

You can’t trust the Tories with our NHS. It’s too much of a risk to take.

Labour founded the NHS and we will restore it to good health.

This is central to our plan to transform Britain – our plan to create a fairer Britain for the many not the few.

We will set out our policies in full in our manifesto tomorrow.

The scale of our ambition will be clear - it will be inclusive of all aspects of our society, fair to all aspects of society and it will be fully costed.

We are going to transform Britain, together, for the better.

Only a few weeks remain to take that message to the people of Britain.

To show how we will hand power back to you.

So that everyone in this country has a stake in their future.

A future, a Britain, for the many, not the few.

I want to conclude by saying this. Those who work in the NHS represent the best in our country and our society.

But there are aspects of inequality within society, which our NHS has to cope with. Shorter life expectancy in the poorest parts of our country, those who become addicted to substances because of the misery of the lives they lead, those who live in poor quality housing likely to get ill; those that go through enormous stress likely to suffer mental health conditions.

We need to reform these aspects of our society so we can all lead healthier, richer lives.

I am very honoured to be invited here today. I am very grateful to all of you for the work you do in keeping us healthy.

I want to work with all of you in the future to improve the health, the happiness and the opportunities for everybody in our society.

Thank you very much for inviting me today. 

Working people £2,300 worse off under Theresa May’s watered down National Living Wage

The Tories are today claiming that they will ‘continue increasing the National Living Wage’. However, hidden in the small print of their press release they let it slip that they are planning to water down the existing National Living Wage.

This change would leave the average full-time worker on the National Living Wage £2,283 worse off by 2020.

Earlier in the Parliament, George Osborne announced that the Tories’ so-called National Living Wage (NLW) was to hit £9 per hour by 2020. To get here the Tories promised that it would reach the level equivalent to “over 60 per cent of median hourly earnings” by 2020.

Today, they’ve broken this promise and changed their commitment to increasing the National Living Wage only “in line with median incomes”.

This means that the National Living Wage will be £8.20 in 2020 as opposed to the promise of £9 per hour under Osborne.

In contrast, Labour is committed to a Real Living Wage of £10 per hour by 2020.

Ian Lavery, Labour’s National Campaign Co-ordinator, commenting, said: 

“Theresa May is taking working people for fools.

“This morning she claimed she was standing up for working people, but hidden in the small print of her announcement is a cut to working people’s incomes.

“The Tories cynical ploy to pull the wool over voter’s eyes won’t work.

“Today’s ridiculous claims are yet more evidence that this election is a choice between a Tory party that fails working people and a Labour Party that will stand up for working people and deliver a better, fairer Britain.”

Jeremy Corbyn in the 1980s vs David Cameron in the 1980s. I think this says it all.

Are cabinet ministers in a competition to see who can make the most appallingly inhuman speech?

Corbyn lowest expenses claimant ever!

http://www.islingtongazette.co.uk/news/politics/islington_north_mp_jeremy_corbyn_is_the_country_s_lowest_expenses_claimer_1_748369… as if we need any more reason to vote for him

Love you Jezza

The Tories are letting down young people - Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Education, responding to the Government statement on increasing tuition fees above their current £9,000 a year limit, said: “The Tories are letting down young people. First they trebled tuition fees saddling students with debt, now they’ve confirmed they’re set to go up again. “Labour has consistently warned that these further increases in fees will be a barrier to aspiration, making it even more difficult for those from low and middle-income families to get the best education they deserve. “Theresa May’s warm words on standing up for working people have been exposed as a sham – all her Government is offering is more of the failure we’ve seen from the Tories for the last six years.