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this relates to a similair situation.an mp elected on a single issue,hospital closure,because everyone in the town was mobilised behind the cause.
Natasha Grzincic visits the Wyre Forest constituency to see how independent MP Richard Taylor has fared since his shock election in 2001
At the 2001 general election, Labour lost just eight seats. While the Lib Dems and Tories picked up seven of these on a small swing away from the government, it was a new but unlikely local political party led by a retired physician in the west midlands that dealt Labour its most shocking blow. In the Wyre Forest constituency Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern, a single-issue campaign to save the local hospital, overturned a 7,000 Labour majority to unseat a junior minister with a whopping 17,630 votes.
Just four years earlier, Tony Blair had pledged that if he came to power he would replace the ageing, multi-sited hospital in neighbouring Worcester with a brand new facility built with Private Finance Initiative (PFI) money. Literally and metaphorically, he was targeting ‘Worcester woman’: the middle-class, middle England swing voter who would play a large part in New Labour’s general election landslides. But after the election, the Labour government realised it could not afford the new Worcestershire Royal Hospital: its cost rose by 118 per cent by 2000. Sacrifices had to be made: Kidderminster Hospital would lose all its acute services, including its casualty department and intensive care units, and be reduced to a souped-up day clinic.
The people of Kidderminster were up in arms. Theirs was the hospital the people built: Kidderminster Hospital’s League of Friends had contributed nearly ?3m during the past decade; now they looked on as removal vans hauled away the equipment they had purchased. Henceforth, more than 100,000 people would be made to travel between 18 and 35 miles to get to their nearest casualty unit.
So the community fought back. A broad-based grass-roots campaign was formed to reverse the downgrading of the hospital. A 12,000-strong march and rally filled the town centre. Petitions containing more than 100,000 signatures were presented to Downing Street. A human chain was even formed around the hospital.
At first, there was hope that Labour might save the hospital; after all, the local Labour MP David Lock was the campaign’s vice-chair, and it was the Tories who had started squeezing out some of the hospital’s services in the 1980s. But Lock U-turned soon after he became a junior minister.
With no party to represent them, the campaigners decided to seek election themselves, standing on a Health Concern ticket. None of them intended to become politicians or do more than save the hospital. But they immediately won seven seats on Wyre Forest District Council, entering a coalition to deny Labour control. They also won a handful of seats on Worcestershire County Council, as well as some in neighbouring Shropshire.
The next step, Westminster: Worcester woman defied all belief and elected only the second independent MP since 1945, Dr Richard Taylor (the other being Martin Bell).
‘You cannot understand how strongly the whole community felt,’ exclaims Vicky Constable, Taylor’s constituency secretary. ‘We couldn’t afford to get ill, we were afraid to be ill. This was a passionate issue that affected every single person, no matter what they earned or who they were. And we had a man who could carry it forward.’
Health Concern and Taylor compelled the government to concede that some services needed to be returned to Kidderminster Hospital: 47 beds have since been restored for in-patients, and Kidderminster was granted a doctor-free minor injuries unit. A recent independent audit stressed that more services should be returned to Kidderminster to ease waiting lists and cancellations in other parts of Worcestershire. Nevertheless, most of the old Kidderminster Hospital remains dark and abandoned. The parking lot is virtually empty. No sirens, no wheelchairs, nobody. There is one refurbished block that has just opened: the ?18.5m state of the art treatment centre. But on the day of my visit to the town it, too, is vacant and feels unwelcoming: the reception desk is deserted as it’s after dark. Two teenage girls are hanging around in the atrium, staring at a trendy art installation. One comments: ‘This hospital never looks busy.’ The other nods: ‘It should be made into a shopping mall.’
At the upcoming general election, however, Richard Taylor is expected to retain his seat. Nobody I spoke to in Kidderminster dared say they would vote differently. Even the competition pays its respects: ‘He’s everybody’s idea of how you want your doctor to be,’ says local Liberal district and county councillor Mike Oborski.
If ever there was a people’s politician, Taylor is it. He had been a doctor at Kidderminster for 23 years, well-known and respected in the community. Having voted Labour, Lib Dem and Tory at previous elections, he epitomises the floating, disaffected Middle Englander, suspicious of government sleaze and spin and tired of yah-boo politics. In short, Taylor is an ordinary man standing up for local people who feel their voices have not been heard at Westminster.
Taylor’s zeal for Parliament shows no sign of diminishing. ‘Being an MP is hugely advantageous. You always get an answer, and I can see and talk to people of all levels,’ he says. He talks enthusiastically about his adjournment debate on the threat of EU proposals to Worcestershire’s sugar beet farmers, and lavishes praise on the library briefs he, as an MP without a whip, so depends on for information.
Since the election, Taylor has tiptoed around the Kidderminster Hospital issue, being careful not to base his platform on saving the hospital but improving the NHS. He secured a much sought-after place on the House of Commons
health select committee. His biggest achievement is that the government has not done another Kidderminster: ‘No other hospital in the country has been downgraded as severely as ours was.’ An independent body has been set up to decide on a case-by-case basis whether specific hospitals should downgrade or not; the aim is to ensure that decisions are not made for political reasons. And even the government’s mindset has come round: two years ago, it published its Keeping the NHS Local guidelines, which demanded that the views of local citizens be taken more seriously. ‘We could have written that document,’ says Taylor proudly. ‘It proved that bigger isn’t necessarily better.’
Perhaps best of all, however, the government was forced to acknowledge that the strength of feeling of local campaigns simply cannot be ignored. But Taylor’s unique position does not denote a victory for socialism, or anything like it. He might have voted against the war in Iraq, but he’s also against same-sex marriages and the hunting ban. So does he think Westminster absorbs the rebellious? ‘Oh heck,’ he replies haltingly. ‘Well, I guess one could say I’m watering down my attack on them. The only way I can get anything for my people is by not putting the government’s back up too much.’
Could this really be the new politics? And if Health Concern weren’t led by such a magnetic personality, would the campaign have got such a high profile? Perhaps not. In district council terms, Health Concern reached its high-water mark in 2001, when it held 21 out of 42 seats. Some members have since defected to other parties, and it now holds just eight seats. It seems that Health Concern managed to break the political mould and create an atmosphere of discontent around a progressive issue, but then lost the energy to build on that and waned.
Health Concern calls itself a broad, apolitical church. It is a mix of rural Conservatives, lefties, old Labour, liberals and non-voters united in their desire to save the hospital. There’s no whip, no party line and no national policy. ‘We work by consensus,’ says Health Concern member and former trade union activist Howard Martin. ‘There’s always been a feeling that the main parties want to get back to traditional party politics, and they don’t know how to treat us. But we will work with any party if we agree with them.’
Other parties have expressed frustration at the broad church: ‘The group has no common platform and lacks direction,’ says Oborski. ‘They needed to find a structure that works, a way of taking decisions. They never did that, so they ended up with a malaise that helped to kill them.’
Martin dismisses the idea that the only issue that binds the party is the hospital. ‘We’ve become much more than a single-issue party,’ he says. ‘Health Concern is not only about saving Kidderminster; it’s about health and the NHS, and about community wellbeing.’ To prove his point, he enumerates some of the areas in which he feels Health Concern has succeeded on the district council: regeneration, recycling, leisure, community housing, balancing the budget.
But he admits that his party still hasn’t got the message through to the ‘people at large’ that it’s more than a single-issue party with strong social policies. Not all of the party seems prepared to move in that direction, either: one of its big internal arguments these days is whether it should change its name to something more encompassing, such as ‘Health and Community Concern’. It remains unclear in which direction the group will go.
According to Martin, Health Concern’s decline was inevitable. ‘We came in through revolution, not evolution, and when you come in with a big bang you get the passion and the support from a very volatile community but you eventually lose impetus,’ he says. ‘We developed too quickly, but we are not going to go away. Whether we are in local government or not, we will continue to be a political force and raise the quality of life in Wyre Forest.’
A more telling picture comes from local hospital staff. ‘Health Concern? They’re still going?’ asks surprised Unison rep Paul Taskar. ‘There seems to be a lot of talk but not a lot of action. They got into power and that was it. We’re still waiting for concrete changes.’ Other union members murmur in agreement.
The anger in Kidderminster hasn’t dissipated. There’s a sense that if that passion were channelled in a more radical direction, Worcester woman would be prepared to follow. But there’s little remaining of ‘the left’ in Kidderminster. The town, once famous for its carpet mills and sugar factories, has been taken over by supermarkets and chain stores. The few remaining old Labour types who still believed in their party’s socialist wing got swamped out by the likes of Lock. No one else, and this applies to Taylor, too, is really fighting the government.
Take, for example, the PFI: the very reason why Kidderminster Hospital was downgraded in the first place. Although Taylor believes PFI is wrong as a concept, he never actively campaigned against it. ‘We knew very well that people in Worcester needed a new hospital and it could only be purchased through PFI at the time,’ he says. ‘We had to be practical. We didn’t want to be seen campaigning against their needs. Perhaps that seems illogical.’ It does seem the easy way out.
But it’s the PFI that could potentially bind the community once again. The payments on Worcestershire Royal are ?22m a year, and the annual deficit for Worcestershire’s acute hospitals in the last financial year stood at ?12.8m: that’s ?5m more than the deficit that led to Kidderminster’s downgrading. Even so, hospital employees believe Worcestershire Royal has been built ‘on the cheap’. ‘The actual building is a rabbit warren: lots of narrow passages that don’t go anywhere,’ says one trade unionist. ‘It contains fewer beds, not enough for the patients that need them. We’ve had to open beds in the old buildings. And we’re always running out of things. It’s not a nice place to work.’ Every local seems to have a horror story. Like the elderly woman who broke some bones in a fall and had to be X-rayed in a wheelchair because they couldn’t get her a bed. Or another who was sent to a private nursing home to recuperate because there was no room at Worcestershire Royal, only to be presented with a hefty bill at the end of her stay. The parking is atrocious. Waiting lists and hospital cancellations are rocketing.
Even at Kidderminster’s treatment centre, complaints are plentiful. An employee who worked through the hospital transformation laments: ‘Morale is still very low. There was a lot of anger when staff were made to relocate. And all the money that’s gone into the centre – it has been misspent in trying to make it look good.’
It’s difficult to tell if Health Concern will leave a lasting impression on the political system. But time is running out. The group knows it needs to broaden out and build upon its parochial arguments to sustain its campaign, and that it must reconnect to the trade unionists and hospital staff who faded away when it became clear Kidderminster Hospital wasn’t coming back whole. But it faces an ageing membership inside and a depoliticised populace at large.
Oborski talks about Health Concern as if it already is a party of the past: ‘At its best, Health Concern was smart, new and inspirational. Later, it was simply a rather inferior imitation of any other conventional political party. It will now simply fade away, leaving a warm glow but no record of achievement.’
Single-issue campaigns and independent candidates have sprung up across the UK: note Galloway’s Respect, or the suspended Uzbek ambassador Craig Murray who plans to run in Jack Straw’s Blackburn constituency to highlight Britain’s complicity with foreign dictatorships. But as Wyre Forest shows, it’s difficult to become part of the system and not have your message diluted; and once you’re in, it’s even more challenging to build a wider campaign when you started off focusing on one issue.
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FAQ
What annoyed me was some 'suit' giving the reasons why maternity consultants were being centralised at North Tees and one was...'many Stockton residents would not travel to Hartlepool if services were located in the town' ... but it's OK for Hartlepool people to have to travel to North Tees. 
Oddly, it then stated that....'Stockton residents would instead go to James Cook University hospital' ...so if it's that convenient, why do they need the consultant led unit at North Tees ... we'd have the strange situatuion of the two units fairly close together 
