NHS vote: what do you think?

Photograph by 38 Degrees

There wasn’t much in it, but yesterday we lost the NHS vote we’d campaigned on in the House of Lords. 262 Lords voted in favour of a special scrutiny committee for the dangerous NHS plans. 330 voted against. If just 35 more Lords had voted the right way, we would have won the vote.

That doesn’t mean our campaign didn’t have a big impact. Members of the House of Lords were talking about it all day, and there were mentions of our petition all over the media. During the debate, Lord Hunt said: “That is but one small reflection of widespread concern within the community about the NHS.”

But it’s nowhere near over yet. We need to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get ready for the next breakthrough opportunity that comes up on the NHS. Yvonne, a 38 Degrees member, said on the Facebook page, “We may have lost the battle, but we have not lost the war!”

Here’s what some other 38 Degrees members have been saying since the news came in:

• Mari: “38 Degrees ‎is a shining star in rather dim times!”
• Anthony: “Keep the spirit up, everything is possible.”
• Jan: “I will most definately continue to campaign…”

Lots more members got in touch with ideas about what we could do together in the future:

• Emily: “Let’s see if we can facilitate LOCAL protests (not just the big city ones).”
• Ann: “It seems there were about 150+ peers who did not vote; I wonder why and maybe we could target these next time?”
• Adam: “The best option is for us to continue campaigning. There may be more amendments during the committee stage and third reading”
• Julie: “We have lost two battles but NOT the war…we actually got a lot of support from the cross benchers and some lib dems re supporting the Owen amendments, so the ground work has been done.”

What do you think about what’s happened? What should we do next together to help save the NHS?