diary of an activist

im sorry i've been away from this site for too long.i feel like i belong here,and i've missed visiing and contributing.

i've not been entirely"awol"/absent without leave.its partly because as the class struggle has geerally been heating up,so has the level of activity for myself,esepcially having had some ratehr major changes in my own life:moving from being off work on long-term illness,which was a kind of temporal"no-persons land"to retirement.i still get sick but what life energy i still have is now less subject to"wage-slavery" and frees me to be an activist,organiser and writer.

suddenly things for me have"taken off"too,so i thought id return and write a kind of activists diary.i'm also lucky enough now to have my own blog.anyone visiting that will find it quirky-and its not just"politics"but id like to welcome people to it.ill make the link next time i visit here,and i will try to make sure i visit more frequently to keep something which approximates a diary.

so i will start with today....

helath problems and disability make for a slow start these days.today i set off for my penultimate acupuncture treatment at whatused to be a small hospital but which over the last few years has been transformed into a differenet kind of health centre,or health service facility.i'm sure sure whether that transformation involved a"cut",as such things are not always that easy to identify,which is exactly one of the ways the british state has develped to undermine,undercut,devalue and destabise the service.the nhs/national health service,is still a genuine"jewel in the crown"of the post world war ll class compromise which for over 50 years has been the flagship of the welfare state.but it is now urgent that we both defend it and argue that it should reflect the needs of the whole community and especially our classs,form below. whilst it is currently probably the only eleemnt of the welfare state left with any"content"socialists need to spell out and articulate what a renewed health service needs to look like.that service needs to engage and nvolve both its workers and users from below spelling out our collective needs.that has to involve taking out the huge profieering by the pharmaceutical industry which would probably provide enough resources alone to fund most if not all treatments for most people most of the time.even undr attack from the political clas here,the nhs still comes out in the top handfull of health services of over 100 across the world.even as the current compromise it meets the needs of most people most of the time.it may not manage the extreme specialisation of medicine in the united statements but there the comparison ends because the nhs is plagued by other issues,and the few achievements in for example very specalist and rare surgery is not available to many let alone most of the population of the usa.

as usual,i talked to"my"physiotherapist during my acupuncture tteatment.in other countries acuuncture would not be available free at the point of use.yet a few weeks ago,that same therapist indicated that physiotherapy is beggining to be regarded as not essential to medical treatement and may become subjject to efficiencies and cuts.no-one dies through lack of physiotherapy,it is said,but thats not the way the community as oppossed to managers wil judge the health service.it is clear that such eroson of services can then be used to destabilise wider and more basic services and could topple the whole nhs future.

so today,i talked about being involved in the campaign for the counighan-sanchez family in kilburn who have been made homeless by the local council who only seeem determined in their casual brutality to victimise a family merely because the family are poor and the council desperate for cuts.traeted with contempt by her local mp/member of parliament and until last nights lobby meeting byt the leader of the council there are signs of change and perhaps we realy can roll back the impact of cuts and austerity on at least one family.this wil inspire us to go n to fight with and for others.

so i left behing camapigning material n the family campaign and for the campaign to defened andother of the local hospitals agaisnt closure fo the accdent and emergency department.tomorrow sees the ultimate event in the dpac/disabled people against the cuts,with uk uncut(anti cuts organisation) and con/counter olympics network agaisnt Atos the major company sponsoring the paralympics but charged by government with assessing people with disablities so that they can be removed from benefits and forced back to work-even though there is no work to be found.what irony and hypocrisy is this!

it would be good if we could shut Atos down and break the government policy behind it which is designed as a class atttack on the poorest and most vulnerable.i will be amonst those determined to resist their class imposing austerity on us.so far it is estimated that over 1,000 people with disabilities have died so far as a result of this process.


we cannot allow them to make us pay for their crisis.as"occcupy"identified many months ago-and others before them-capitalism is crisis!