Saturday. 1st December midday on College Green - Defend Our NHS

Advance notice of Bristol's next lefty demo - you won't read about this anywhere else, it's top secret with no advance publicity other than a strictly limited edition of badly written flyers being handed out.

This is a demo organised by union types peed off 'cos the end of national payscales means their members pay is going to be cut.  Personally not an issue that I care two figs about: national payscales are one of the problems of running nationalised industries they're not something I'm going to take to the streets to defend.

But there is a tonne of stuff wrong with the government's current plans for the NHS:

• unaccountable and untested GP commissioning bodies handling hundreds of billions of taxpayers money is a recipe for chaos and fraud
• abandonment of any planning for the provision of essential local services, it's all going to be left to a quasi-free market
• no clear funding streams for unpopular but essential national services, eg, drug rehab
• continued use of rip-off PFI schemes to fund new capital projects
• really the Tories want to privatise the NHS and sell everything off

That's why I'll be demonstrating in the city centre on December 1st and you should be too if you give a flying one about your own and your friends and families health.