Bleed the Banks, not the NHS

Subsidy to the Banks: £100bn. Cuts to the NHS: £20bn. Sound fair to you?

UKuncut staged protests all over the UK today in an Emergency Operation against Andrew Lansleys proposed attack against the NHS.

In Camden the protests were staged outside the three main banks. A friend of mine had made a monopoly board, where we flippantly bought up a hospital for a couple of hundred pounds or picked a card from the 'No Community Chest' to be told that due to funding cuts the heart operation in desperate need would have to wait a further six months. Couldn't buy the railways because they were already sold.....

I was dressed like a corpse, in black, surrounded by people dressed as doctors, nurses and patients who were all drawing attention to the £100bn subsidy the government pays to banks.

I kept my flyer so I could share with you what I learnt:

A recent BBC investigation found HSBC used a tax loophole to divert millions of pounds of NHS money to a Guernsey tax have.

In 2010 a company set up by HSBC made more than £38m from its 33 PFI hospital building schemes and paid only £100,000 in UK tax - less than half of its 1% profits.

Stuart Gulliver, the new chief executive of HsBC, recently received a honus of £9m - which could pay the annual salary of 400 nurses.

"Lansley - Leave our NHS alone. It's the banks that are sick!"

Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill would open up health care to multi-national private companies.
Big business and banks get bail outs and evade paying £120 billion in tax each year but the government says public services have to pay for the crisis.

You know they aim to cut £20 billion from the NHS.

What does this mean in your area?
How many health workers will lose their jobs and hospitals close?

Here, have the full story and some pics:

My lovely Camden in the Sun - The Sun! Cuts kill: the dead lying on the monopoly board:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3606829/Sick-protests-over-NHS-cuts.html

And lots of pictures of my lovely Camden in the Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391822/Banks-siege-anti-cuts-protesters-rally-support-NHS.html

And some super ones here:
http://pcseuston.org.uk/photos-and-video-from-uk-uncuts-emergency-operation-in-camden/

The message is getting through. I very much hope it does so on all levels. I applaud UKuncut for their intelligent visual forms of "civil disobedience". I do not applaud government policies that require a need for it.