2,500 sign NHS petition in Brighton and Hove in just three hours

Campaigners said that 2,500 people in Brighton and Hove signed a petition about the health service today (Sunday 4 September) in just three hours.

The petitioners oppose the coalition government’s Health and Social Care Bill which they say will pave the way for the privatisation of the NHS.

More than 50 campaigners from Brighton Keep Our NHS Public, Brighton Stop the Cuts Coalition and Brighton Trades Council took to the streets to ask people to sign the petition.

They said the response showed that people in Brighton and Hove do not want their NHS broken up and run by private providers.

Phil Clarke, from Brighton Stop the Cuts Coalition, said: “We urge the two Conservative MPs in our city to remember that they stood in the election on a promise of ‘no more top-down reforms of the NHS’ but are now planning to vote through the biggest and most destructive ‘reform’ of the NHS since its inception.

“Locally, only Caroline Lucas has currently pledged to vote against this bill.”

The campaigners said that they would deliver the petition to the local Conservative Party on tomorrow (Monday 5 September).

The bill is due to be debated in Parliament this week.

Peter Knight, from Brighton Keep Our NHS Public, said: “If this Bill is passed, our NHS will cease to exist as we know it.

“It will no longer be publicly owned.

“Voters will have no say in how services are run.

“We will be left with private firms sucking vital funds away from frontline services, with profits and shareholders’ interests being put before patients’ needs, as we recently witnessed with catastrophic results in the Southern Cross care home scandal.”

Brighton Stop the Cuts is due to meet on Wednesday (7 September) at 7.30pm in the Phoenix Centre, Brighton.

Keep Our NHS Public is due to meet next Monday (12 September) at 7pm in the Wagner Hall behind St Martin’s Church in Lewes Road, Brighton