Over the last week, 38 Degrees members have been voting on whether to carry on the fight to Save our NHS. There’s now no doubt about the answer: a huge 96% have voted “yes, we should carry on campaigning to save the NHS”.

More than 45,000 38 Degrees members have also shared ideas for tactics in the next stage of the campaign. Right now, the 38 Degrees office team is reading through all the ideas for how to protect our health service, and seeking advice from experts – including health professionals, lawyers and academics – to help draw up a shortlist of the top ideas.

38 Degrees members have made some brilliant suggestions. Anna, from London says “Make sure that new NHS structures are made accountable to local people every step of the way.” Sarah, from Altrincham suggests we should “Support doctors standing as Save NHS candidates in elections, to keep the issue fresh.”

Once all the ideas have been collated and analysed,we’ll need to vote together to decide what we’ll do next together to save our health service.

In the meantime, if you have other ideas about next steps on the NHS campaign, please share them in the comments section below.

38 Degrees members decide together what we campaign on. Polling enables us to get a clearer picture of what our key priorities are. A few weeks ago, thousands of us voted on what the next set of campaign priorities for 38 Degrees will be – and now the results are in!

A team of volunteers in the 38 Degrees office start by reading the ideas suggested on the 38 Degrees Facebook page, Twitter, the blog, on the website  and by email. A shortlist of the most popular ideas are then gathered together for the poll to be sent to 38 Degrees members. For more information on how the team sorts this data have a look at this blog.

Then thousands of 38 Degrees members voted on the campaigns they thought were most important to prioritise campaigning on.

The priorities, in order of the number of “a lot” votes they received, is:

• NHS: Continue the campaign to protect the NHS
• Tax Dodging: Demand a real clamp down on tax dodging
• Lobbying: Continue to demand a real ban on secret lobbying
• Bankers Bonuses: Stop excessive bankers bonuses
• Executive pay: Stop excessive levels of pay for top executives
• Protecting our forests: Continue speaking up for our forests and oppose any future sell off
• Electricity and gas bills: Stop rip off gas and electricity bills
• Privatising the police: Campaign against plans to privatise key bits of the police
• E-petitions: Campaign to tighten up the rules on government e-petitions
• 50p Tax: Campaign to keep the 50p tax rate

Below is a graph of the poll results.

What next?

These results will determine where we put most of our efforts over the coming weeks and months. It means the office team have a clear direction to follow, when they are deciding how to research campaign opportunities, or developing ideas for how we work together in the future. Sometimes we have to wait for the best moment to effectively create change by moving together.

What do you think?

What do you think of the results? Are there any other campaigns you think should be on the list? Post in the comments section below or on our Facebook page.

Over the last week, tens of thousands of us voted and made new suggestions on what to do together next to save the NHS.

The 38 Degrees office has looked at every single response to the poll using the techniques and tools normally used when 38 Degrees members are asked what they want to do next (there’s an in-depth look at how this works here, here and here).

The result of the vote leaves us with no doubt that the 38 Degrees members who voted want to show the Government the public want Lansley’s plans to be withdrawn and rethought.

We have also agreed on some winning tactics, which are (in order of preference):

1) Build a petition asking MPs to hold a fresh debate on the reforms in the House of Commons.
2) Build a petition calling for Lansley’s secret ‘risk register’ to be released so we can understand the dangers of his plans.
3) Send emails to MPs, Lords and Baronesses to ask them to rein in competition and privatisation plans.
4) Make the NHS changes an issue in the London Mayoral elections.

What next?
We start putting all our winning tactics in motion over the next couple of weeks. We can start now by signing the epetition calling for a debate in the Commons on whether Lansley’s plans should be dropped.

What do you think?
What do you think of these results? Are there any other priorities that you think should be on the list?

Almost exactly a year ago, 38 Degrees members finally managed to stop the terrible plan to sell off England’s woodlands. It was a huge victory for people power and over 500,000 of us played our part in it.

We’ve helped keep our national forests safe.  But beautiful wild places owned by local councils could still be under threat. Quantock Hills in Somerset are under threat.  If the sale goes ahead, a beautiful area of woodland and open countryside could be at risk.

Can you add your name to the petition to stop the sell-off?

The Quantock Hills are beautiful. Famous English poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge have written about them. Rare plants and animals thrive there. Hundreds of thousands of people visit every year. If they’re sold, there’s every risk we’ll see fences going up and crucial habitats in danger.

If Somerset County Council get away with this, other councils across the country could start trying to sell off local wildlife havens too. Stopping Somerset Council should help stop these kind of sell-off schemes becoming a new national menace.

So it makes sense for all of us who stood together to protect woodland owned by our national government to speak up against Somerset Council’s local sell-off plan.

A huge people-powered petition can make Somerset Council think again and safeguard the Quantock Hills for future generations. Add your name now – local 38 Degrees members will deliver the petition before the Council votes.

Is your local council threatening to sell off a natural treasure like the Quantock Hills? Add your stories below to share with other 38 Degrees members.

Photograph by 38 Degrees

Over the past year, we’ve had some big successes in the Save Our NHS campaign. We helped force the government to delay introducing their changes and launch a “listening exercise” which reigned in some of the dodgiest parts of the plan. We raised money to bring in expert lawyers, helping to push the House of Lords to demand further amendments. Over half a million of us have been involved in the campaign so far – signing petitions, sending e-mails, donating money, meeting up locally – and the difference we have made has been huge.

Andrew Lansley’s plans look different to when we started. We’ve helped force him for example to row back from scrapping his legal responsibility for providing health service. But at the same time, the plans still look pretty bad – just last week, the Royal College of GPs warned that they will “cause irreparable damage to patient care and jeopardise the NHS”.

So, what should 38 Degrees members do together next? Should we continue to focus on trying to amend the plans, zooming in on dangerous proposals to extend competition and privatisation in the NHS? Or is it instead time to change tack and campaign the whole plan to be scrapped – a longshot, but possibly more in line with what we’d like to see in an ideal world?

We can do more than one thing at once, but we can’t do everything. We have the most impact when we focus. So please share your thoughts by doing the 2 minute survey here.

Photograph by 38 Degrees

I thought it might be time to give a quick update on the NHS campaign. It’s been a bit quiet over the last few weeks, but things are about to hot up again.

Andrew Lansley is still trying to get his plan through parliament. It finally passed through the House of Commons last summer. It has been in the House of Lords for the last few months. Before Christmas thousands of 38 Degrees members contacted the Lords with concerns as the plan went through “committee stage”.

On February 8th the next stage in the House of Lords begins – “report stage“. Report stage will last a few weeks. This could be the final time that the House of Lords discuss the NHS plans in detail.

Before report stage starts, we can expect the government to announce if it will make any changes in response to our campaigning. Our people powered legal team is standing by to quickly analyse the proposed changes. They will cut through the spin and legal speak, so we are able to respond together.

Once report stage starts the Lords will have another chance to vote on changes to Lansley’s plan. They will be able to vote both on changes proposed by the government and changes proposed by other Lords. Some votes could be very close. We may have to pull together quickly to make sure the votes go the right way.

When we hear the government announcements and see what changes they are proposing, 38 Degrees members will have to vote together to decide what we should do next. This is likely to be within the next two weeks.

At the moment, we’re hearing a mixture of rumours on how much ground Andrew Lansley might have given. On the one hand, there are some encouraging signs that lords have secured important concessions on keeping the Secretary of State’s “duty to provide” a health service.

On the other hand, just  a few hours ago the Royal College Of Nurses and Royal College of Midwives announced that they thought Lansley’s plans were still very dangerous. They argue that the best thing would be for them to be scrapped altogether.

We will need to be ready to move fast and vote to decide together what we do next.

It’s amazing to think that when we first started to campaign to protect our NHS, people told us we were
wasting our time. They said the changes would be done and dusted by December 2010. But we didn’t give up. We kept up the pressure and defended our health service.

By working together we’ve formed the biggest campaign ever to protect the NHS. We are now half a million strong. We’ve signed petitions, delivered them to our MPs’ doorsteps and put pressure on key politicians. Over the last few months over 50,000 of us have contacted members of the House of Lords. On top of that we’ve funded a crack legal team to get to the truth of what’s on the table and expose the full extent of the government’s plans.

It’s nearly a year and a half since we started the campaign. Soon we’ll need to be ready for another big push. There will be more than a few politicians hoping that we’re worn out by now, or that we’ve got bored and decided to do something else. Time and again, 38 Degrees members have proven those who’ve doubted our commitment wrong. We know how important our NHS is, and that’s why we’ll keep working together to protect it.

So, please watch out for an email in the next couple of weeks asking you to help decide what we do next. In the meantime, if you’ve got any thoughts or ideas you’d like to share with other 38 Degrees members do share them in the comments below.

Earlier today the Independent Panel on Forestry – which is advising the government on forestry and woodland policy in England – published its interim report.

You can read it in full below and download it as a PDF here (this may take a while to download as it is 7MB in size).

You can read more about how over 500,000 38 Degrees members campaigned to protect our public forests here and here.

What do you think of the report? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Independent Panel on Forestry Progress Report (1)

Below is a guest piece by David Gillon, a 38 Degrees member and blogger who raised some significant questions about 38 Degrees’s people powered system of choosing campaigns. One of David’s main criticisms is that in a system where the most popular campaign suggestions get prioritised, it can be difficult for marginalised voices such as disabled people to be heard.

I invited David to share his viewpoint and concerns here so that we can consider them together. Please share your thoughts and comments in the comments below.

David Gillon

“Disabled Benefit Recipient”. What word just popped into your head? Scrounger? Faker? Fraud? I walk with crutches, I’ve been called all of these, and worse, by complete strangers in the street. I’ve even been physically assaulted simply for walking while disabled. And this was going on even when I was still in full time employment and claiming no disability benefits whatsoever. Nor is any of this unusual, it is in fact the near ubiquitous experience of disabled people in contemporary Britain after years of deliberate and calculated demonization of disabled people by the media. And in the past 18 months it has become far, far worse,  the attacks from the tabloids coming in near daily. We have our own names for them now, the Hate Mail, the Vexpress, the Scum, because we know that all we can expect from them, and their puppetmasters at the Department of Work and Pensions, is their hatred and the carefully selected stories calculated to convince you that we are all fakers living a life of luxury because we’re too lazy to work.

And that’s a problem for disabled people, and for 38 Degrees. Society has been brainwashed, you might not know it, you might protest against it, but brainwashed it has been, beliefs eroded by story after story, until what leaps to mind isn’t a recognition of people needing support, but a presumption of fraud and idleness and luxury. The disability benefit fraud rate isn’t the 75% the tabloids would have you believe, it is 0.5%, less than the rate of internal DWP error.

I want to put brainwashing aside for a moment and talk about the things the Tory press simply haven’t been telling you at all (and sadly disabled people now have to number the BBC amongst the Tory press). When the Coalition took power, they swore to protect the most vulnerable of all, then promptly turned around and closed the Independent Living Fund, the benefit paid to the most disabled people of all, those who need aid with nearly every aspect of their lives.

Next up for the axe was Disability Living Allowance, the DWP telling us that there had been inexplicable rises in the numbers of people claiming it. Campaigners pointed out that DWP hadn’t allowed for such esoteric factors as people retiring with the benefit, or children claiming it, because, no matter what the Chancellor may have claimed repeatedly, DLA is not an out of work benefit. DLA is available to any disabled person who passes its strict criteria – yes, no matter what the Tory press tells you, it is tested, and frequently retested unless you have a lifetime award. They aren’t happy with the number of those, either, but as often as not a disability is for life, not just for Christmas, so what’s the point of testing year after year to see if a leg has grown back yet? All miracle cures gratefully received!

Lose your DLA and you lose everything, Carers Allowance, Motability and so on. The tests for DLA are incredibly strict, I struggle to walk and I don’t pass, you need to be unable to walk even 50m to get the Mobility Component of DLA, but the Coalition aren’t satisfied and want to replace it as with Personal Independence Payments (hiding the fact that it is even a disability benefit), with tests designed to exclude 20% of those currently getting DLA, not because they aren’t disabled, just because. And in an act of incredible spite they want to take DLA Mobility Component away from anyone in residential care, which will mean disabled children not able to get home to see their parents, disabled adults not able to go out to the cinema, the pub, or home to their partners and children. The Low Review has just been published to detail all the damage this one change will cause, but we still need to fight it and there is so much more to fight. Meanwhile Tax Credit changes will cost families with disabled children £1400 a year.

The changes to housing benefit have drawn quite a lot of press coverage, but relatively little on how serious they are for disabled people who are facing multiple hits from the changes. Younger adults will be expected to live in ‘houses of multiple occupation’, but that could be seriously damaging to someone with mental health or other issues. Then people are going to be docked for having spare bedrooms, but disability means equipment, wheelchairs, ventilators, partners not being able to share beds, and they all have to go somewhere. I saw a story recently, a family of five, three of them disabled, they can’t survive without 5 bedrooms, but 5 bedrooms will be unacceptable under the new regime, and on top of that the capped percentage of average local rents simply won’t cover the cost. The National Housing Federation estimates 108,000 disabled people could be forced out of their homes because of this.

The last area I want to focus on is Employment and Support Allowance, the replacement for Incapacity Benefit. This has been an ongoing disaster since Labour introduced it and brought in the French multinational ATOS to run the Work Capability Assessment testing. There are stories about ATOS ‘medical professionals’ indulging in homophobic rants, needing to have the patient explain what their disability means, reporting results from tests they haven’t completed, the list goes on. The GMC had to issue a formal reminder that patients must be put first at all times and that honesty is a professional requirement (you really couldn’t make this stuff up!). Many of the ATOS centres are not wheelchair accessible, the vast majority have no disabled parking, there are other failings, ATOS claim they’re good enough. My own ATOS experience was good by comparison with many, but I’m still traumatised by it a year later and it ended up as evidence in a Select Committee Report (and now I am facing a retest). I got off lightly, Black Triangle report there are now 16 documented post-WCA suicides. ATOS, meanwhile, have been threatening legal action against disability websites collecting and publicising these stories. So what did the Tories do? They made the tests harder to pass. Fail the WCA and you’re thrown onto Job Seekers Allowance, but I’ve been there, done that, and JCP admitted after my complaint that the only way they could cope with my disability was by ignoring it. It’s estimated that retesting of Incapacity Benefit recipients as part of the migration to ESA will see 600,000 to disabled people thrown onto JSA (and existing statistics from ATOS testing suggest the figure could be over 1 million). Meanwhile, 1 in 8 ATOS decisions is overturned at appeal, a load which is costing the country £50m a year and has the Tribunals Service groaning at the seams.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Coalition plan to introduce time-limiting of ESA  from April. This will mean that those in receipt of Contributory ESA will lose their benefit after 12 months unless they are so disabled that there is no possibility of them ever working (and people with, for example, severe MS, or even terminal cancer, have regularly failed to make this grade). For many of us, I’m one, that means losing all eligibility for any benefit, for so long as we have any assets (such as pension funds) or if any member of the household has even a pittance of an income (a figure actually lower than the minimum wage). 700,000 people the government admits are too disabled to work will be affected by this, some will be able to claim income related ESA, but for 400,000 of us it means sacrificing our savings and pensions, or becoming absolutely dependent on partners, with all the stress that will impose on a relationship.

Most of these changes are built into the Welfare Reform Bill, which has almost completed its passage through the Lords. We had hopes of hamstringing it there, but the Coalition gerrymandered it into Grand Committee, which contentious bills are never meant to go through, and now a single vote can kill any amendment, while peers opposing the bill say so much information has been left out it is impossible to tell just how bad the effects will be. We had hoped to get the support of non-disabled groups, such as 38 Degrees in opposing it, but our cries for help went unheard. What happens next scares many of the disability campaigners, we’ve just last week heard of a double suicide by a veteran and his intellectually disabled wife who had struggled to access benefits, our fears are that there will be many, many more, making the post-WCA suicides just the forerunner of mass tragedy. Go to the website Where’s the Benefit? (where I blog regularly) and you’ll find a link to the Samaritans on the front page. That link is there because we regularly have people respond to our posts with a quiet, considered discussion of their suicide plans for when the cuts take their benefits away. And it is fear of what is to come that has us so desperate for support from the non-disabled groups. We can spread the word amongst the disability community, when we’re well enough, but precious few others come to our websites or read our blogs, we’re screaming into the darkness, but no one hears us.

Which brings me back to the problems of brainwashing. 38 Degrees is based on a democratic model, its campaigning driven by the demands and interests of its members, and that’s no bad thing in theory. But we aren’t dealing with theory, we’re dealing with messy practise, and not all campaigns are created equal. Crips aren’t cuddly, we aren’t cute, we’re positively demonised in the national psyche. How do we win a popularity contest?

The answer is that we don’t, we can’t, we’re labouring under too heavy a load of anti-disability propaganda that has shaped views of us as a minority of lazy, selfish, fakes and frauds, living lives of luxury with our Bentleys and our yachts. The truth is far different, but the media aren’t interested in telling you the truth. So an organisation that should be helping, but which clings to a democratic model we’ll never be able to access, is obviously one disabled people find a little bit troubling.

When we didn’t even make the latest poll, no matter DLA related issues were clearly the second most highly rated issue on the UserVoice pages, never mind the several thousand missing votes that 38 Degrees had been claiming to be investigating for 8 months, things became a little fraught.

I blogged about this in annoyance, expecting to be a lone voice, but I’d lanced a upwelling of frustration within the disability community, and the tweets of support and the visits to my blog just kept climbing to levels I’d never dreamt of seeing. Kudos to David Babbs for having the nerve to post in reply and then talk to me over the phone, and I’m now reasonably happy to accept that nothing was done deliberately, but the annoyance across the disability community was, and is, very real and that is something that we, and 38 Degrees, need to address. (This blog is part of that process).

The democratic model is praiseworthy, but it can’t address all issues, and most specifically it can’t address the needs of marginalised groups, and their inability to access that model may traumatise them further. The democratic model condemns you to doing what is trendy, not necessarily what is right and desperate need is not the same as well known, nor as popular

Remember, slaves didn’t have the vote, no vote told Wilberforce and the abolitionists that they needed to campaign for what was right. Women didn’t have the vote, no vote told the Suffragettes to get out there on the streets and fight for their democratic rights. Democracy is a luxury those who live on the disenfranchised margins of society can’t afford and can’t access, and 38 Degrees owes it to itself to find a way to let them be heard.

As for what you can do to help us now, a welcome first step would be to vote for Pat’s Petition which aims to get the Welfare Reform Bill paused for review in much the same way as the NHS bill. Beyond that, watch out for actions by Black Triangle, the Hardest Hit and Disabled People Against the Cuts, or take a look at our online presence at websites such as the Broken of Britain, Diary of a Benefit Scrounger and Where’s the Benefit, or vote for 38 Degrees to take action. And when the media tells you that we’re all fakes and scroungers, vote with your feet and take your custom elsewhere.

Over the last few days, tens of thousands of us have been voting on what to do next together to stop the energy rip-off. The initial results of the poll are in and together we’ve come up with a plan for how 38 Degrees members would like to keep working together to get a fairer deal on energy.

Volunteers in the 38 Degrees office have spent the last few days analysing every single response to the online poll using the techniques and tools normally used when 38 Degrees members are asked what they want to do next (there’s an in-depth look at how this works here, here and here).

Below is a look at how 38 Degrees members answered the question “what is the best way to stop the energy ripoff?”

The results of the vote gave two priorities:

• Make energy tariffs clearer
• Energy companies should be more upfront about what deal is cheapest for you

It is not surprising that we all want clearer energy pricing, even accountants and A-Level maths students can’t understand gas and electricity bills!

What next?

These results will help determine what we focus on in coming months but as always they are just the start. They give the staff team a direction for researching campaign opportunities and developing ideas for action. We won’t be able to do everything immediately. Sometimes we have to wait for the moment when we can effectively create change by moving together. And as the campaign develops the team takes in a constant stream of ideas and feedback from members using email, Twitter, Facebook and the campaigns suggestions site.

What do you think?

What do you think of these results? Are there any priorities that you think should be on the list?