Dear BBC Blah Blah Blah

Dear ms ambreen

Reference CAS-1379184-J1Y6RZ

Thanks for contacting us about BBC News.

I understand that you feel we haven’t devoted enough time or provided in-depth coverage of the Health and Social care bill and the opposition to it.

The political opposition to the Bill culminated in the House of Commons emergency debate on 20 March. Accordingly, the Commons debate featured heavily in our news coverage on the day and was the lead story during our main news bulletins.

The Health and Social Care bill has been one of the biggest UK stories over the past few months and we believe we have afforded it the appropriate level coverage in a fair and impartial manner, allowing viewers and listeners to make up their own minds on the matter at hand.

The time given to each issue or report in the news has much to do with whether it’s news that has just come in and needs immediate coverage, how unusual it is and how much national interest there is in the subject matter. The choice has to be selective and no matter how carefully such decisions are made, news editors are always aware that some people may disagree with them.

We’ve covered this story regularly over many months, both throughout our news broadcasts and in current affairs programmes offering more in depth discussion. You can view examples via the links below:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_lords/newsid_9699000/9699477.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_lords/newsid_9701000/9701904.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12177084

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17289988

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16933394

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-14779676

Nevertheless, I fully appreciate that you feel that we haven’t provided sufficient coverage of this bill, therefore please be assured that I’ve registered your complaint on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s made available to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

Thanks once again for taking the time to contact us with your concerns.

Kind Regards

Anna Sweeney

BBC Complaints

www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

NB This is sent from an outgoing account only which is not monitored. You cannot reply to this email address but if necessary please contact us via our webform quoting any case number we provided.

The BBC Trust is proposing some changes to the complaints service. Have your say at: http://consultations.external.bbc.co.uk/bbc/complaints_framework

Anthem (Leonard Cohen)

I can’t run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
a thundercloud
and they’re going to hear from me.

Petitioners.. Lend me your ears

Avaaz, 38 degrees, Care2… We British love a good petition. We can save the forests, halt Rupert Murdoch in his dark and dirty tracks. If enough of us get involved, heck, we could even save the NHS! Couldn’t we? Dr Kailash Chand’s petition to ‘drop the health bill’ currently stands at 151,565, surpassing the 100k mark backbenchers need in order to discuss the will of the people. By a long shot. The people have spoken, it would seem. The NHS is saved! Isn’t it?

Mark Donne wrote an enlightening piece for the Independent in which he explains that our collective voice has been given a platform that is not all we perceive it be. ‘Clicktivism’, signing a petition, hashtagging,  is holding us back and merely “provide an extremely convenient holding centre for disgruntled or livid voters. Most are unable or just too busy/ exhausted/lazy to attend a demonstration or occupation, but click here, “like” this and you have resisted: you (and the forces you oppose) can sleep at night.”

A ruse to divert us away from actually acting.  As a nation, we’ve been forced to subscribe to this method of activism because we have seen what happens when we do vote with our feet. Armed police on horses charge into crowds full of children, politicians strike up dialogue calling for water-boarding and rubber bullets and people get beaten and detained, their identities embedded into systems that will hold them for however long the establishment deem fit. We live in a tyrannical state.

When the Prime Minister of this country holds a summit to discuss NHS ‘reform’ and how these changes affect GPs yet refuses to invite said GPs, he is making a statement that the matter is not open for discussion. Why haven’t the BMA and Royal College of General Practitioners been asked to attend? Could it be because they oppose the bill and fear that rather than reforming the NHS, they are in fact destroying it? So PM Cameron is actively denying a voice to anyone that might object to his make-the-Tories-even-richer-by-going-private scheme. When a number of Lords and MPs look to benefit personally from us all going private, it makes it all the more sinister.

A selection for your perusal:

• The former Conservative Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley is a Director of BUPA, the health insurance, private hospital and care group.

• Baroness Cumberlege of Newick, Former Tory health minister, runs Cumberlege Connections, a political networking firm that works “extensively” with the pharmaceutical industry

• Baron Newton of Braintree – Advisor to Oasis Healthcare on dentistry and general healthcare matters.

• Lord Ballyedmond – Chairman of pharmaceutical company Norbrook Laboratories.

• Lord Bell – Chairman of Chime Communications group, whose lobbying clients include Southern Cross, BT Health and AstraZeneca. Tim Bell has a conviction for ‘wilfuly, openly and obscenely’ exposing himself ‘with intent to insult a female’ under Section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act.

•  David Cameron - Nursing and care home tycoon Dolar Popat has given the Conservatives £209,000. The Ugandan-born dad-of-three has amassed an estimated £42million fortune as founder and chief of TLC Group, which provides services for the elderly. Mr Cameron made the businessman a peer shortly after entering No10 last May, and Lord Popat’s donations include a £25,000 gift registered a week after the Tories’ health reforms were unveiled last July.

HT @socialindepth

(For a comprehensive list of MPs and Lords set to financially gain from the dismantling of the NHS, please visit http://socialinvestigations.blogspot.com/2012/02/nhs-privatisation-compilation-of.html)

With all of this going on right under our noses, we have a right to be angry. We have the democratic right to protest, apparently we live in a ‘democracy’. Mark Donne agrees, posing the question to Noam Chomsky “what he thought the outcome would have been if the nearly 500,000 who have signed a yet-to-be presented petition against the privatisation of the NHS had joined the other 3,000 in occupying Westminster Bridge in late October.” Noam simply replied, “You would have no bill”.

Although petitions are proving to be entirely useless, history will remember we opposed this bill in our hundreds and thousands. To ensure an outcome, we need a million (wo)man march. Somehow we must fight back against the scare tactics employed to silence us. Disgruntled citizens the world over are saying enough is enough, organising marches, rallying, making their governments fear them and the will of the people.

Why do we remain so afraid of ours?

REFERENCES

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-donne-could-a-renewed-activism-translate-into-serious-pressure-on-the-government-6256633.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/feb/19/david-cameron-nhs-summit-criticism

Tory Story

I was a small child when I first heard the word Tories and my understanding of it stretched to the name of their leader and how she stole all the milk. I had another run in with them aged 8 when they were voted in again; I remember my teacher was in a particularly sombre mood that day. I grew up believing politics wouldn’t do anything for me, that voting was pointless. Until the last election.

I suddenly found myself in a world where our forests were of no importance. Where agencies I’d found invaluable through my work were having their funding cut and given to coercive ‘charities’. Services for the most vulnerable women and children in our country. Libraries, they were getting the chop too. I had begun an access course with a view to a degree in criminal psychology but totting up the sums, I had to make a serious decision to discontinue. Then came the benefit cuts, people no longer being able to afford their homes and the government legislation that would lead to seriously sick and disabled people cut short of their lifeline. Anyone would think the Tories wanted people to die. Further proof of this could be found in what they had planned for our beloved NHS.

I recently had my first encounter with a patient being advised to pay for her own operation, at the Atos offices. She was quite clearly struggling along on crutches; she didn’t sound or look healthy. I didn’t want to pry but she obviously needed treatment except she wasn’t going to get it. What an utterly bizarre experience. I’ve tried to understand the kinds of operations we will have to pay for and I guess this probably means ‘elective’ procedures. The cyst I had removed had 1.2 litres of fluid in it and whilst I’d have preferred a course of magic shrinking pills, this was not possible and the excellent team at Kings convinced me to have it removed. That was an ‘elective’ procedure, the consent form said so. Imagine having to live with something like that because you couldn’t afford to pay for it. Furthermore, if I were able to afford a decent private healthcare plan, would they cover for pre-existing conditions? What a mess they’ve made, those Tories. What a dirty word it is.

I voted Labour at the last local election. On the advice of a good friend who was by no means Labour herself, but had acknowledged that old people were less likely to die in the winter. It was a good start. The Tories don’t care about the old; they don’t care about the young. They don’t care about the poor, or the middle. They have a particular aversion to women, especially those going it alone. They don’t like students, or those that don’t know their place. They haven’t got a care in hell for those facing persecution or eviction. They just want your money. (*there is no benefit in talking about the Fib Gems at all)

If we don’t like where they’re cutting/spending our money, we should stop giving it to them. By continuing to pay, we are complicit in their actions. Time to research how to make this a reality, all comments are welcome, advice would be handy too.

Thank You NHS

I wanted to thank you, NHS, for bringing my sister and me into the world safely. We were a couple of months premature and our parents thought we wouldn’t survive but you took care of us and nurtured us to health. My dad was a mechanic and my mum, a housewife. They couldn’t have done it without you. You were also there when my baby sister and brother were born.

You helped save my twin sister’s life when she was five. She was scalded by a kettle full of boiling water. I thought she would die that day but as my sister later told me, the quick thinking and heartfelt actions of the doctors and nurses with their buckets of iced water meant she was home the next day, slathered in ointment and bound in bandages. She went back to the hospital every week until she was healed and they even offered to graft new skin where the old was scarred. Thank you for saving her life and her skin.

A short while later, possibly a reaction to seeing my twin suffer in the way she had, I was admitted to hospital with high blood pressure and loss of appetite. I was barely 6 but my memories of that time were filled with highs and lows. The lows being the tests the doctors had to subject me to and the highs, the nurses that made the days a little sunnier. The sense of fun that there is on a children’s ward despite the sickness; friendships are forged, pain’s forgotten. Thank you, NHS, for your amazing staff and their time.

When one of my teenaged friends decided she’d had enough and took a bottle of painkillers, it was the same children’s ward that asked her why she did it, and they listened. They helped her access the right services, so that she could talk to someone. In the end, SHE was thankful that they’d saved her.

Thank you for providing clinics and walk in centres. When my GP wouldn’t believe that I knew my own body and that I most certainly was not just another female not drinking enough water, I demanded another opinion and was begrudgingly referred for a scan. Thank you NHS, for discovering a 17cm cyst on my left ovary, and referring me promptly to have it removed. They did the same again when it had refilled to 14cm, just 6 months later. They reassured me they would do their utmost to ensure it had some remaining functionality and they were true to their word.

I wanted to thank you NHS, for the safe births of my niece and nephew. My sisters are both thankful too. I, especially want to thank you for the support my niece received when she was diagnosed with Malignant Infantile Osteopetrosis. She was going to die at 6 months. She survived having a shunt fitted to drain the water off her brain followed by, nerve decompression surgery, a form of chemo to kill off her immune system so that they could build her back up again with those amazing stem cells, and a cocktail of drugs designed to prevent her body from rejecting them. Sadly, we lost her baby sister but I still want to thank the NHS for trying.

I want to thank the NHS for the way they have supported me over the last few years. Operations, babies dying, babies suffering life threatening complications and a car crash that tipped me into PTSD have all taken their toll. I have a slipped disc in my back, the GP though it could be muscular until I had an MRI scan. They’re really expensive, those things. Thank you NHS, for thinking I was worth it.

I wouldn’t be alive today, if it wasn’t for the NHS.