Manchester Conservatives Deputy Chairman and local candidate for Didsbury West David Semple took part in Question Time Special organised by Manchester User’s Network. The panel, consisting of parliamentary and local candidates representing the whole political spectrum, was chaired by BBC health correspondent Elaine Dunkley.
Welfare cuts will push Britain’s mental health services towards crisis
Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Iain Duncan Smith, recently proposed a further £12 billion of cuts to benefits. Making such cuts is likely to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including those with mental health problems and other disabilities. After all, approximately half of people who need support from the disability benefit Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) do so because of their mental health.
Ending the NHS “Sell off: the abolition of your NHS” (Full Movie)
I will shine a torch on what some doctors see as a glaring omission in the national psyche. I have identified a powerful group of figures within the NHS who are alarmed by the public’s lack of awareness about the abolition of their NHS. This film will follow their arguments right the way up to the Health Secretary’s relinquishing of responsibility for the nation’s health, and will argue that it must be reversed. This film also takes you on a personal journey to a national theme that has massive implications for us all. It will reveal a hidden agenda that’s already having disastrous effects. According to one senior consultant: ‘It’s like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank’. Each of the insiders will speak to us intimately, as if we’re patients in the consulting room. It will be clear that these doctors are people simply doing their jobs by putting their patients’ interests – which are also the viewers’ interests – first. What perhaps will surprise us most is how efficiency and quality will drop. Or, perilously, how close we are to falling forever down a pitiless US-style empty well of no-bucks-no-care. Though the diagnosis remains bleak, the strength of the characters at the film’s disposal should give us surprising hope, casting flashes of light across an otherwise bleak landscape. The style of the film is intimate, hand-held scrupulousness. Interviews will take place in discreet corners of hospitals, surgeries and streets, the images at times elevated by a powerful soundtrack, leaving the viewer with an overall admiration for the doctors’
