Lead story

Leave the EU to save the NHS

by Daphne Liddle

DR DAVID Owen, once a Labour Foreign Secretary who led a right-wing split in the party in the early 1980s to form the short-lived Social Democrat Party, was once a staunch supporter of Britain being part of the Common Market. But last week he called on people to vote to leave the European Union in order to rescue the NHS.

Owen was speaking in response to a claim by discredited Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt that leaving the European Union would endanger the NHS. But Lord Owen said: “The EU/Eurozone from 1992, in marked contrast to the old European Community of 1975, creeps into every nook and cranny of our life.

“It is now becoming entrenched in the NHS and this June we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get it out.”

Read the full story here >>

Leave the EU to save the NHS

150,000 tell Cameron to go

by New Worker correspondent

MORE than 150,000 people marched from Gower Street near Euston to Trafalgar Square last Saturday, in a giant march organised by the People’s Assembly as a March for Health, Homes, Jobs and Education but, in the wake of the Panama Papers tax dodging scandal, added one further demand — that David Cameron must go.

Before the march the organisers issued a statement: “The Tories are facing their biggest crisis yet. Revelations of David Cameron’s stake in his father’s off shore tax haven prove that this is a government for the privileged few, not for the majority.

“This shows beyond all doubt that Cameron is divorced from the life of any working person. The Government’s failure to deal with the steel crisis could leave thousands without a job. They’ve attacked junior doctors and student nurses while privatising the NHS.

Read the full story here >>

150,000 tell Cameron to go

Editorial

Winners and losers

ANCIENT societies often had strange rites of passage for adolescents to mark their passage from childhood to adulthood. In the modern world we have exams and the exam season is looming. These exams cause our teenagers incredible amounts of stress and anxiety, leading them to take drugs, drink high caffeine drinks, lose sleep and often become quite ill with worry.

They are led to believe that their performance in the exam room will determine their whole future; that failures are doomed to a miserable life of grinding poverty and low achievement whereas those who manage to pass will get to a good university and a life of wealth, fulfilment, open choices and comfort.

This is not true. By the time most are in their 30s life will have happened to them: human relationships, work, marriage, parenthood, accidents, illnesses and chance happenings that will change the direction of their lives, and they will end up in a job that has little or no relation whatever to the facts and figures they desperately tried to cram into their heads in the week before the exams.

The ones who “fail” and end up seeking a job instead of going to college often end up materially better off in the long-run. “Failure” is certainly not the disaster most teenagers believe it to be. Their life may take a totally different turn from what they had hoped but that can end up just as rewarding and fulfilling.

Students’ chances of passing are affected by lack of sleep, headaches, hay fever, the drugs they have taken to suppress headaches and hay fever, bladder problems and many other things. Within a month the facts and formulae they have desperately stuffed into their heads from revision aids will be just a muddled jumble in their quickly fading memory.

Read the full story here >>

Winners and losers