Don't vote Labour to save the NHS in Birmingham Erdington. Vote for Dave Nellist.

Labour's candidate for the Erdington by-election Paulette Hamilton supports ICS's, NHS privatisation by stealth. A by-election is looming in Birmingham Erdington on the 3rd of March, following the sudden death of Labour MP Jack Dromey. Labour has selected Paulette Hamilton, an NHS nurse of 25 years, a serving councillor on Birmingham City Council for the last 17 years and is the current cabinet member for health and social care. Impressive credentials you might think, the NHS would be safe in her hands you might think. In 2018 Hamilton attempted to get Fairway Day Centre closed. This was a facility used by 50 elderly and special needs adults, Birmingham City Council, with Cllr Hamilton at the helm wanted to close it down claiming it was underutilised and would cost £400,000 to repair. It was ultimately blocked by the High Court after lawyers successfully applied for a judicial review claiming inadequate consultation had taken place. Despite her credentials as an NHS nurse, last year she tweeted out support for Matt Hancock of all people saying how he spoke passionately on the importance of health whilst discussing social care and a move towards ICS’s, or Integrated Care Systems. ICS’s might sound great, if you take them to imply that areas of health would be working together to deliver better care services, but in reality they come together to be rewarded on the basis of how much of the services they can cut from a shared budget. And this is what helps the private sector grow instead. If you think, well Labour wouldn’t do that surely, despite her praise of the idiot Hancock, then it’s because you don’t remember New Labour’s commitment to closing services. And just a month earlier she had praised a meeting she had with New Labour relic Jacqui Smith looking at developing integrated care, primary care and their place in an ICS. Labour are as committed to these Integrated Care Systems as the Tories are, because they are in fact a project developed by New Labourite Alan Milburn with the United States in the 2000s. There really is nothing between them again now, not even on health. In Paulette Hamilton you have just another careerist, who is trading on their NHS credentials when actually she sees care services, from a local up to a national level, as assets to be stripped, not a facility to benefit all, that health is a right, that our health services are in a dire state and instead of pledging to reverse that is committed to more of it. A real vote in Birmingham Erdington to save the NHS and to promote real change away from Tory dogma is not one for Labour, it’s one for the People’s Alliance of the Left and a vote for TUSC candidate Dave Nellist, a real long-term NHS campaigner.