Professor Les Back who blogs at The Conversation

The deafening frequency of the sirens on Wednesday night was reminiscent of London after the 7th July bombings as the police cars and vans hurtled down the New Cross Road towards Woolwich.

It is the soundtrack of the “war on terror” and lasted deep into the night.

Against this piercing sonic backdrop the streets remained unnervingly quiet and without people.

Most residents stayed inside watching the news of violence in familiar places unfold on screens via Twitter, Facebook and often last of all the TV news. It was as if South East London was holding its breath.

For good reason, the bloody pornography of Thursday’s newspaper headlines about the murder did not challenge the violence, rather the news coverage was deeply complicit with its cultural politics.

The colour enhanced photographs of the killer’s bloodied hands were the instruments of the chilling and gruesome spectacle.

The Sun went as far as insisting on having its red top brand logo inserted with the still images taken of the mobile phone footage that appeared on the TV news.

The media coverage of the murder did not lessen the nature of the offense, rather it has circulated and profited from it.

Londoners of all shades and backgrounds were confronted by the gratuitous violent images as they stood next to each other on the train platform or in the Underground.

“See the way the media used ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Nigerian’ to describe them,” a young black Londoner said to his friend: “You know what’s coming next don’t you?”

Blurring the categories will create a wider range of targets for the backlash. “It’ll be the Muslims first though. The EDL have already attacked Mosques in Woolwich and Essex,” he concluded.

The violence and the reactions to it will damage the social choreography of London’s multiculture but not fatally.

I am sure plenty of commentators will line up to rehearse another chorus of the familiar pronouncements about the “death of multiculturalism.”

We’ve seen this all before but the reality of life in the city is paradoxical.

For London is both the stage for divisions and violence and also a meeting place where those differences are routinely bridged and made banal.

“I was just thinking today, there was a woman fully veiled walking through the market buying her shopping.  It was just ordinary I didn’t even notice her,” said a white neighbour. This captures something about the reality of an everyday, unspectacular co-existence.

The public political response has been little more than a war of clichés and well-rehearsed condolences.

David Cameron spoke of the endurance of the “indomitable British spirit,” and “the belief in freedom, in democracy, in free speech, in our British values, Western values.”

I do not minimise the violence or condone the butchery in Woolwich. This has happened in a moment where British life is increasingly militarised.

The military has had a more prominent presence in everyday life in British society from X Factor, to their presence at sporting occasions, to the perennial collections for Help for Heroes.

These become local traces of the wars that are being fought afar in Afghanistan and Iraq and now targeted as a result.

Politicians will deny that there is any connection between war and the murder.

Equally, connections between the reactions to these tragic events and a re-invigorated racism will be steadfastly rejected.

In both cases what we are seeing is not just “lone-wolf” Jihadism, but also this tragedy is a manifestation of the social damage of war erupting in the very ordinary spaces of British life.

The blood-stained headlines will not be easily forgotten but they will inevitably become yesterday’s news. The rhythm of multicultural life in South East London will re-establish itself and find its balance again.

Les Back

Twitter @academicdiary

Who is getting your tip?

Heather Saul on how serving staff are deprived of the tips paid for their work.

A bar tender drops a cocktail at work. She has worked there for many years, and – unusually – has never dropped one before. The full asking price of this cocktail (not the cost price) will be taken out of her next pay packet. Tips she receives on shift are collected in a jar: for a ‘staff night out’. She has been waiting for this staff night out for a year now.

A waitress takes home a ‘generous’ 60 per cent of her tips – the tips that customers give, directly to her, as a means of saying thank you for the service that she alone provided them during their meal. The remaining 40 per cent is not given to the kitchen or front of house. It will instead go straight into the pockets of the wealthy restaurant owner.

When I was 17, I worked at a cafe where all tips had to be handed straight to a manager – being caught keeping your gratuities was cause for instant dismissal. We would see them picked up at the end of a long day, dropped into the till and subsequently vanish. Over a year spent working for £3.30 an hour, I built up a brilliant relationship with the regulars and I was often tipped. I never saw a penny of it.

Tips are a way for customers to recognise the extra mile that those in the hospitality industry go, to quite literally cater to their every need. What most patrons do not know is that tips are also a mental stimulus for us as we power through our ten, eleven, twelve hour shifts without a break – something that is widely accepted within the industry.

I asked a friend what soft drinks she was allowed during her shifts at a bar. “Water”, she said, “from the tap.” Because whilst many company employees enjoy the perks of working where they do, hospitality staff lose rights to any company privileges. Resources and time must not be wasted on us whilst there is a sea of drunken customers out there screaming for a double that they want RIGHT NOW.

After speaking to friends, and friends of friends, we also realised that as bar staff our job stretches out well beyond serving up food and drinks. We have an important role as listener, shoulder to cry on, and carer when someone has had one too many. We cheer you up when your boyfriend mis-behaves, we make your favourite coffee when you are sad or are having a bad day. We break up your domestics and get rid of the guys giving you trouble, and we put you in taxis home when irresponsible friends abandon you.

Tips also help compensate for the habitual ‘CHEER UP!’ from lads lads lads;  for the slurred abuse we get from customers who we have to refuse; for the sexual innuendoes thrown at us from across the bar.

We are much more than the faceless figure delivering food, or handing you a pint: we improve a bad night and make a good night even better. It is time for bosses to recognise that their staff are the face of their businesses, and help bring in a large proportion of their customers. An excellent standard of service is cultivated by decent working conditions, and the easiest way to create that is by simply letting staff keep the gratuities the customer wanted them to have.

Laura Liszewski

Laura Liszewski, an American studying journalism at University of London, Goldsmiths College, gives her verdict on the United Kingdom Border Agency’s decision to remove stricter monitoring rules for international students at UK universities. 

The Government announced last week that international students are no longer subject to stricter attendance checks than fellow classmates from the United Kingdom and the EU.

The policy reversal came in a UK Border Agency letter sent to higher education institutions across the country.

It said: “I can confirm that we no longer require you to report to us when a student has missed 10 expected contacts…We only require you to notify us at the point that you withdraw sponsorship.”

Before the policy revision, universities were required to report an overseas student to the government after 10 absences, leading to possible dismissal and deportation.

The Guardian reported in December of universities employing demeaning tactics to comply with ambiguous rules on monitoring attendance: Coventry University made overseas students report to check in points three times per week around campus, while Newcastle University had thought of using biometric fingerprint data for students to prove they were actively studying. Those plans were dropped, however, before they could be put into effect.

I suppose the government U turn should be applauded, yet I am left feeling wholly underwhelmed.

After being welcomed to the UK for a year of study at Lancaster University in 2004, I had always dreamed of coming back. England suited me: the standard of education in the UK is incredibly high, the institutions are globally respected, and the structure of study allows for more depth and independent learning than American universities.

However, the hoops I have had to jump through this time around to undertake an MA at Goldsmiths College have not left me feeling so welcome as before.

The visa application in 2004 was relatively straightforward. It has since doubled in length and ambiguity. Get any one part of it wrong, and the entire application will be sent back, starting the lengthy process all over again.

After registering my biometric fingerprints Big Brother style, I waited patiently during the estimated processing time, and then waited some more. UKBA will not take any visa-related enquiries, so the only point of contact available is via Worldbridge, the outsourced “partner” company that deals with all visa payments.

A call to the customer service at Worldbridge will cost you a mere $3 plus tax per minute. Considering that Worldbridge have absolutely zero authority on immigration policy, however, and with less than a week to go and no visa, I paid an additional $150 to have my application “expedited.” Lo and behold, it arrived the next day – a bargain at just under $600 (about £400) total.

As I approached passport control at Heathrow, I was bombarded with ad-hoc signs saying that all international students must fill out a special registration form, which included a question on whether or not I had experienced coughing fits in the past few months. I chased down three different immigration officers who seemed to know nothing about the form, what it was for or where to find it.

Finally getting  hold of the form, I frantically filled it out as the queue moved forward, carefully ticking the “no” box to the question on whether or not I had tuberculosis. Handing it to the passport control officer, she looked at it with a roll of her eyes and said sarcastically: “Americans don’t have to fill out these forms.”

Once they arrived in the UK, UKBA gave students just one week to be registered at understaffed police stations. Many queued throughout cold nights in order to comply. Quite unfairly, I was once again exempt from this inconvenience as an American.

Mark Harper, immigration minister said a few weeks ago: “The increase in non-EEA student applications is further proof that the UK remains open to the brightest and the best and international students…this shows that despite stories to the contrary, students continue to want to come to the UK to study at our world class universities.”

Watching my loans pile up for the “privilege” to receive less than half the respect and decency afforded to my classmates at these “world-class institutions”, I question what Harper says will remain true.

The announcement to drop the ridiculous 10-absence rule is a small victory, but it does not erase the bad taste being treated like a criminal – and one who is paying a dear price to be here – has left in the mouths of international students throughout the UK.

EastLondonLines published a series of opinion pieces by overseas students who have gone through the UK visa process.

Pic: Gian Merz

Last week Roke Primary School in Croydon was told by the Government that it would be sold to the Harris academy chain. The swift action to take a school out of local authority control is revealing of the Michael Gove agenda which is not, it would seem, about giving power back to local communities.

Parents say they are baffled that after only one inadequate Ofsted report it had been deemed a struggling school – eastlondonlines reported.  They describe the Ofsted report as a “blip in performance” of a school which has always had “excellent” Ofsted results and they have started a campaign against the academy takeover.

Since the Ofsted inspection that took place last May the school rectified the mistakes that caused the lower Ofsted mark, and a further inspection by the local council has confirmed this.

The Department of Education said that it is necessary for the academy chain, which is run by Lord Harris, the Carpetright millionaire, to takeover the school.  They argue that children deserve access to high quality education and they point to the fact that the same academy sponsors have turned around struggling schools in Croydon.

Academy companies have made school management more streamlined and more efficient and this has produced good results in some cases. But if there has not been any due process and consultation around the takeover of this particular school, the government is just unashamedly taking an opportunity to sell school property to Harris.

Sometimes when a school is genuinely struggling teachers and parents are happy to admit that help is needed. This was seen when the Westwood Girls School, also in Croydon applied to become an academy in Autumn last year, following a low GCSE pass rate.

But in the case of Roke primary, the community around the school the parents, the governors and the teachers want to keep the school how it is.  And, this is where the buzzwords of Gove’s education policies should have come in. His policies are marketed as beneficial because they allow parents to have more choice and more of a say in how their children’s school is run.

But there are contradictions around the word ‘choice’ – in so many cases; you only have a choice as long as you choose the private sector.

The ‘local community having a say’ part has been elusive when education policy is played out in practice. If schoolteachers and parents want to make a good school out of what they have got, then they deserve to be listened to and not ignored.

Appealing to a concept of free choice does not work if it does not really exist, and this type of behaviour on the part of the DofE makes it even harder to have any trust in Gove and his new ideas.

Pic: Simon Harriyott 

Mary Seacole, the ‘black Florence Nightingale’, may be removed from the national curriculum raising the question, whose history are we teaching?

With a revealing use of pronouns, Michael Gove, Minister for Education told the Conservative Party conference in 2010: “Children are growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know – the history of our United Kingdom.”

As any good History graduate knows, the human past is a useful thing: a tabula rasa on which to inscribe ideological tales. By answering questions of individual and collective identity, history can bind a group of potentially very different people. Ofsted sees school history as ‘useful’ and ‘relevant’ for exactly this reason, it empowers children to: “reach an informed understanding of, and respect for, their own and each other’s identities”.

Until recently ‘the history of great men’, had been set aside in favour of the in-depth study of individual moments. Gove, apparently seething that Churchill was not on the syllabus, has turned back the clock on that, with plans for a national narrative of 200 great Britons. The Sunday Times giddily announced ‘School history puts back 1066 and all that’.

But if you teach British history through historical figures, it will be the history of men. White men. “Mary Woolstencroft is a prime example,” says Dr Lucy Robinson, lecturer of History at Sussex University. “She’s not the only woman in history to think about politics, but at points down the line, people have gone, ‘We need another woman in here.’” If Seacole’s place isn’t saved, Elizabeth and Victoria may well be the only female names on the syllabus.

Like much about this very Victorian government, their proposed version of history is, ironically, backward looking. Historians have spent the last forty years resisting grand narratives, which tend only to have space for the structures, experiences and institutions of the dominant hierarchies.

The passing of Eric Hobsbawm, the pillar of history in the Left’s academic pantheon, just previous to Gove’s onslaught seems significant. For him, history was about agency: collective stories could empower communities and inspire individuals. One teacher recently told the story of a boy in her class, having been taught about Seacole, asking: ‘She looks like me – did she really do all that?’

Writing for ELL, it is impossible to ignore the long shadow of the riots of 2011. Croydon, Lewisham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney are some of the most diverse, and deprived, boroughs in the country. They also played host to some of the saddest scenes from the unrest, predominantly acted out by a younger generation.

Unlike the early-80’s ‘race riots’ of Brixton and further afield, the summer of 2011 didn’t see violent reactions to an oppressive or non-representative social structure. Oh no, this was about kids after a new pair of trainers. But history is a convenient place to bury your sins. We don’t have race riots any more, the Tories tell us. We learnt from our mistakes. While at the time, Thatcher attacked weed and gang culture as the root of the unrest.

By offering a patchwork of figures, experiences, and events that schoolchildren, with their own diverse backgrounds, can navigate as they choose, history can aid social inclusion. Conversely, by offering a sole you’re-in-or-you’re-out narrative, the recent social unrest may well repeat itself. And when you consider that the majority of London’s schoolchildren are now non-white, you can’t help but think the posh white boys must have got this one wrong.

But pull back a little, take a look at the speed and depth with which this government has already punished those that don’t fit their bill – the demonisation of the poor and the withdrawal of their benefits, the social cleansing of inner-cities set to commence with the universal benefit cap, and the swinging immigration limits – and you get a pretty worrying sense of a masterplan.

Pic: Tooba Masood

Right now, all eyes are on India.

Everyone wants to know what is going to happen next in the Jyoti Pandey’s rape case. Journalists, residents, activists, students, friends and family of the rape victim are waiting for some justice and serious reform. Too bad no one can get in.

On Monday, the five men who appeared in court to face charges of raping and killing the 23-year-old physiotherapy student in Delhi, found themselves two lawyers. This caused quite a commotion in the courtroom as the local bar association had refused to represent them. The judge was forced to reconvene and hear the case privately. It was later announced that the media would not be able to report the trial at all.

Jyoti’s case has made its way into everyone’s home. It is what people were talking about on the underground, at work and at home. It struck a chord in everyone and is refusing to go away.

Her rape and subsequent death seems to have opened a box of worms in the sub-continent.

The day after Jyoti’s rape made the news, several other rape cases started coming up. A 19-year-old girl committed suicide because she was raped and the police refused to register an First Information Report, a document used by the police to file a complaint or offence. The body of a 21-year-old factory worker was found in the suburbs, her family said she was raped. Protests were organised in India, human rights activists prepared themselves to fight and create awareness.

The blood curling details of how Jyoti’s rapists violated her has jolted the country and its people into doing something, but for how long?

A similar incident took place in Pakistan a few years ago. Mukhtar Mai, a woman who is now in her 40s, was gang-raped and paraded around her village naked to settle a matter of honour. A case was filed after the story was picked by the international media. The suspects were arrested but released on bail, and eventually they were acquitted. They are now wandering around the village freely.

In Pakistan, you still need four adult male witnesses or eight female witnesses to prove that you’ve been raped.

I hope India is different, but I don’t see how we’ll ever find out.

pic: Thea Foslie

It’s the first day back at uni, and I am late. While running towards the train station, I fish the £78 for my monthly travel ticket out of the wallet. At the ticket machine I desperately start pressing the buttons while holding my Oyster Card to the touchpad. But what’s this? The price is £81.50! Completely baffled, I fruitlessly search every pocket. By the time I’ve found my debit card and refilled my Oyster the train has left the station.

Once again I am reminded of the short-sighted British government. If anything, especially in light of the recently announced cuts to education and new reduction of post graduate funding, the prices for student travel fares should decrease not increase. Or maybe they just want the student population to suffer.

This week all travel season tickets increased by an average of 4.2 per cent. I fully understand that a rise of £3.50 a month is not a matter of life and death, but the prices themselves are already ridiculous. When the amount of money you spend travelling back and forth to your university is close to your monthly food budget, something is wrong. A student’s budget is limited. This year, I actually wished for a month’s travel card, when my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas!

You should count yourself lucky if you’re “only” paying £81.50 – the fare for zone 1 and 2. Forced out of inner London by rent increases, a student living in zone 3 or 4 has to pay £95.70, or even £117.20, each month if they want to make use of public transport.

When looking at the prices in other European capitals, the travelling costs for students in London are incomparable. In Oslo the monthly travel card for students is nearly half the price, at £42 whilst in Paris a student pays no more than £ 27.70.

I know of several students who can’t afford student travel cards and must find alternative ways of commuting. Cycling is good, but not on icy roads in pitch-black winter evenings.

So, as I count my pennies wondering whether to splurge on a £1 bowl of soup for dinner, before risking death by heavy goods vehicles on my 3-zone bike ride home, I hope next year’s Christmas actually results in a travel card and not new bike gloves.

Pic: Sophie Robinson-Tillett

Sophie Robinson-Tillett suggests that introducing a minimum price for alcohol will not change the ingrained attitudes of UK binge drinkers.

The Government’s ten week consultation on the price of alcohol is now halfway through, and decisions will be made on February 8^th. The proposed introduction of a minimum cost per unit for alcohol retailers is Theresa May’s answer to our national drink problem.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield have advised the Government that a figure of 45p per unit will bring alcohol consumption down by 4.3%, resulting in 2,000 saved lives and 66,000 fewer casualties in the next decade.

I’ve grown up in Hackney, which has in recent years become home to late night revelry on a grand scale. I appreciate, as I step over the teenagers in trilbies vomiting into the gutter at 3am down Kingsland High Street, that England needs to get a grip. It does. We do. Not even Instagram can make that look cool.

I also agree that street drinking is a problem. You only have to wander through Gillett Square to see that there is a community (and yes, they are a community – with lovers and friends and rituals) who spend their days living hand-to-mouth, sometimes shoplifting and often causing alarm to others in the area. I don’t see them as quite the societal menace that some suburban-migrants who’ve bought prime real estate in E8 do, but I do recognise that they are vulnerable people who can display anti-social behaviour, and this needs, somehow, to be addressed.

But making alcohol more expensive won’t make the problem go away. If people start a night, or indeed a day, with the desire to get very drunk then that’s just what they’re going to do, regardless of the price tag.

In Stamford Hill there are a group of Eastern European men that drink alcoholic disinfectant on the corner of the Broadway. I’m talking about the kind that you get in white plastic boxes on the walls of hospital corridors. They tell me that its nickname is ‘Polish Evian’. That’s what happens when you try and price an addict out of the market. Hardly a tee-total utopia.

And then there’s the other end of the spectrum: walk up the road from Dalston to Shoreditch and you can see that binge drinking is not a money matter. The city-slickers that tumble out of cocktail bars on Old Street, effing and jeffing at bouncers and dribbling Patron are, to my mind, more offensive to one’s sense of decency than any homeless street drinker nursing a can of White Lightning. Yet they won’t be affected by the legislation because the proposals will only impact cheap alcohol.

No – the problem of binge drinking stems from national culture, not class. That’s what needs to be addressed.

The new proposals would introduce a minimum cost of £4.22 for a bottle of wine in the UK; but you can easily buy a decent bottle of wine for five euros on the Continent. The difference is that in Spain there isn’t quite the same instinct to stick a straw in it. Britain has a problem with its relationship to alcohol, not to the ease with which we can buy it.

The main problem with trying to combat problem boozing with legislation is that it gives authority to people who don’t have any true understanding of the culture they’re trying to fix. Their knowledge goes little further than a set of figures on their desk, so they deal with it by issuing some more figures.

You wouldn’t ask a Mormon to deal with the rise of sexually transmitted diseases in Britain, so why do we expect Government ministers and academics – who I can almost guarantee haven’t ordered a shot at any point during the development of these proposals – to clean up the country’s drinking scene? At least not without a bit more help from those on both sides of the bar, the people who observe the cultural element that’s threaded through the empirical evidence.

The key to getting on top of Britain’s excessive drinking culture is to get a sense of what’s really behind it, and that is what’s missing from this consultation process. Who knows, Theresa – swap your small glass of Chilean Malbec for a couple of Jagerbombs and you might finally start seeing sense.

Pic: Paul Stein

Ellie Slee, former student at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, gives her view on Education Secretary Michael Gove’s plans to remove arts from his proposed English Baccalaureate.

‘This week, Michael Gove cherry-picked and squeezed a round of applause out of some ‘arts organisations’.

But who were they? Certainly not any of the cultural figureheads who have spoken out in shock at his proposal to remove arts subjects from the core curriculum.

Nor was it one of the 26,000 people – and counting – who are petitioning for reform of Gove’s brainchild, the English Baccalaureate (EBacc).

The secretary of state also said that if Britain’s creativity buckles, he would not be able to sleep at night “knowing that the ghosts of Rutherford and Churchill” were hanging over his bed and chiding him for his failures.

Now, between you and me, I don’t think Michael Gove believes in ghosts, which might be why he felt no guilt as he deftly drew up his plans to alienate art students from the UK education system.

Ellie Slee. Pic: Ellie Slee

I studied History of Design at Central Saint Martins, an institution rivalled only by Antwerp in the production of fashion greats. The list of alumni reads like a who’s who of the industry.

It’s also teeming with dyslexics, arithmophobes (like myself) and people who flat-out failed biology. The majority of students put down their biros when they left school and picked up the pencils they were meant to use.

In short, though he’d never admit it, St. Martins is Michael Gove’s worst nightmare.

Not satisfied with the fact that, upon receiving their degrees and subsequently little governmental support, these British-trained economic assets routinely quit the UK for Paris, Milan and New York, where they are fully appreciated, Gove now proposes that subjects such as art, design technology, music and PE should be squeezed to the edges of the key stage 4 curriculum.

When I first read about the EBacc which, 2015 election permitting, will come fully into effect in 2017, I felt sick. If my friends and I, and the long list of my College’s exports, had been judged on the string of academic subjects put forward in Gove’s EBacc, there’s very little chance we’d have made it to university.

And what that means, World, is that McQueen would never have invented the bumster, Gilbert would never have met George, Jarvis Cocker would never have clapped eyes on a dreamy Grecian aristocrat who inspired the anthem of a generation, and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting at Goldsmiths writing this. Without institutional nourishment of non-academic talent, the rich cultural tapestry that makes me so proud of this country would be horribly threadbare.

It won’t just be university-age young people that are affected by the change. I believe that the detrimental effects of devaluing art education will reveal themselves far earlier in life. In Durham, where I come from, there are few prospects for a majority of people. Arts, technology and sports are a brilliant way of engaging and qualifying children without a lot of academic hope. At school, I witnessed a lot of ‘difficult’ kids find a real niche in subjects like photography and woodwork. For them to lose this avenue of expression, and the little interest they do have in school, would be a genuine travesty.

That’s why I find it extremely hard to believe that Gove was able to find a single representative of any arts organisation who would praise his plans. Anybody who works, studies, or has found the tiniest bit of solace in the arts can only see Gove’s damning manoeuvre as detrimental to the cultural future of this country.

Matthew Kershaw and Heidi Alexander (l-r). Pics: Alan Thomas Dymock, Ellie Slee

As the controversy over the proposed closure of Lewisham A&E and maternity units continues, Eastlondonlines has invited  Heidi Alexander,  the MP for Lewisham East, who opposes the closure and the Office of the Trust Special Administrator, which has drawn up the plans, each to present their side of the case.  

Heidi Alexander, Member of Parliament for Lewisham East:

Heidi Alexander, MP for Lewisham East. Pic: heidialexander.org.uk

As a newly-elected MP two and a half years ago, I felt incredibly proud and privileged to be given the chance to represent the residents of Lewisham in parliament.

The way in which our community has come together to fight the proposed closure of the A&E and maternity services at our local hospital has only served to reinforce that view.

With 22,000 people signing an online petition, thousands more signing in person and over 10,000 people joining together at a peaceful demo at the end of November, it is clear that our corner of south-east London is not going to stand for this brutal attack on our local NHS.

Lewisham Hospital is a busy hospital; its A&E treats 115,000 people every year. Over 4,000 babies are born there annually. Not everything is perfect but it is a valued and necessary part of the health service.

The proposals on the table at the moment would see over half of the buildings at Lewisham Hospital sold off. To what end? To spend money on other hospitals so that they pick up the work that Lewisham is already doing well. Where is the sense in that?

Everyone knows the reason services at Lewisham Hospital have been earmarked for closure is to deal with financial problems at neighbouring hospitals. Why should Lewisham Hospital and Lewisham residents end up paying the price?

I’m not against change in the NHS but change must be driven by the health needs of patients and not an accountant’s bottom line.

The current proposals are based on inaccurate data and flawed assumptions. I am opposed to the cuts to our local services and will do everything in my power to stop them.

The Prime Minister once said he wanted to retain essential services in places like Lewisham; he even named Lewisham as one of 29 hospitals he would be prepared to get into a bare-knuckle fight over. How times have changed. If the Prime Minister wants a fight, we’ll give him one.

The Office of the Trust Special Administrator, South London Healthcare NHS Trust:

Matthew Kershaw, TSA South London Healthcare NHS Trust. Pic: Alan Thomas Dymock

A lot has been written and said about the proposed changes to health services in south-east London, including how they impact on Lewisham Hospital.

Overall, if the recommendations that are being proposed are accepted, we believe that it will have a positive impact on the health of people in south-east London, including people who live in Lewisham.

But how can we be so sure?

Many people in Lewisham may not know that if you had a heart attack in Lewisham today, the ambulance taking you to hospital would drive straight past Lewisham Hospital.

If you had a serious road traffic accident in Lewisham today, involving severe physical injury or a very serious head injury, the ambulance taking you to hospital would not take you to Lewisham Hospital. And if you were having a stroke today, a clot in your brain that could cause brain damage or death, the ambulance taking you to hospital would not take you to Lewisham Hospital either.

So where would these ambulances go?

For stroke and major injury, the ambulance would take you to King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill, Southwark. People having a heart attack would be taken to either King’s College Hospital or to the Princess Royal University Hospital in Bromley.

By creating these specialist centres, the NHS in south-east London has saved lives because the expertise to treat these very serious conditions has been concentrated into fewer hospitals.

On average, patients have needed to travel a bit further to get to these hospitals. But even with those additional few minutes in a blue-light ambulance factored in, patients have had better results overall because the NHS is providing these specialist services in fewer hospitals.

These specialist centres were created some years ago, after a lot of public consultation and a lot of concern from patients about longer journey times to hospital. It is now acknowledged that the creation of such centres has saved lives and improved the quality of clinical treatment overall.

These are the ideas that underpin the draft proposal to centralise accident and emergency units in south-east London at four hospitals, not five.

We aim to have a senior-level doctor on duty in our A&E departments for 18 out of every 24 hours of every day of the year. No hospital in south-east London achieves that target consistently. If these changes are accepted, we believe all our A&E departments will be able to do so in the future.

Most patients, about 75 per cent, who currently use the A&E at Lewisham Hospital will still be able to be treated at its enhanced urgent care centre. But those needing the most critical emergency care will be taken by blue-light ambulance to a hospital that is the same distance or just a short distance further away than now. The result will be more saved lives.

Please give us your views before the end of the consultation, as your views matter and will be taken into account before the final report is sent to the Secretary of State in January.