Can you sew ‘Kill the Health & Care Bill – Don’t Blow It’ hankies for MPs?

Help us stitch up the Health and Care Bill and make Parliamentary history!

999 Call for the NHS Calderdale & Kirklees are embroidering handkerchiefs for 50 MPs with the message:

“Don’t Blow It! Kill the Health and Care Bill before it kills us”

We aim to complete the hankies by 15 August, so campaigners can give them to MPs before 6th September, when MPs go back to the House of Commons.

• 

• 

‘Don’t Blow It – Kill the Health and Care Bill’ action by Unite Community Lancs at Katherine Fletcher MP’s Office

If we manage 50 by 15th August, we’ll aim for a second batch before 30th August.

Please let us know by 5 August if you’re up for embroidering one (or more) of these hankies by 15 August. We can post you white hankies and blue thread and reimburse you for posting them back when completed.

The sewing is very simple backstitch and we have a very simple template and instructions we can send you. This example was sewn by someone who’s not done any embroidery since leaving primary school – no special skills are needed!

The message is not a joke

The Bill (also known as the NHS Corporate Takeover Bill) is bad for patients and bad for NHS staff. It aims to reduce the government’s obligations to secure NHS care for us all  – potentially making the government non-compliant with its duty to provide an effective framework for protection of the right to life.

And it seems set to worsen the current NHS front line staff shortage, by threatening national agreements on wages, terms and conditions of employment, deregulating NHS professions and introducing flexible staff redeployment across NHS organisations, based on “learning” from redeployment of nurses and doctors during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The ‘Don’t Blow It’ hankies will mostly go to MPs in key Tory marginals as we think these MPs are most likely to be inclined to listen to their constituents and tell the government to stop the Bill – which had its Second Reading in the House of Commons in early July.

Actually getting the government to withdraw the Bill would make parliamentary history, we think

Governments have been defeated on amendments and motions but not on whole Bills, we don’t think – and never when the government has a majority.

But the Johnson government are populists – and no government wants to be the one that goes down in history as the one that actually dismantled the NHS – even if that’s what they really want to do. That’s why up until now they’ve all pushed to a point then stopped. 

We are aiming to show MPs that the public won’t stand for dismantling the NHS.  So the government can’t pretend they’re not doing what they’re doing.

This action is just one part of a concerted campaign across the country to stop the Bill – dubbed the NHS Corporate Takeover Bill by national campaign group We Own It.
 
Looking forward to hearing from you by 5th August!