Just what the doctor ordered

Protestors outside the Department of Health
Image credits: 38 Degrees

During a recent homecoming, former Health Secretary and Exeter Alumnus Andrew Lansley spoke to James Roberts, Features Editor, about the Guild, government and a picture of his brain 

Andrew Lansley is the former Health Secretary, who prescribed harsh treatment for the NHS and was duly struck off. After just over a year shrouded in the relative safety of a minor Cabinet position, Lansley’s name still inspires unrelenting rage in fogeyish surgeons and militant revolutionaries alike. As we sit in the Amory building awaiting his arrival, it’s clear from the hastily printed A4 flyers being thrust under the audience’s noses that many on campus have not forgotten the man that tried to ‘privatise the NHS’.

Despite the obvious pockets of ire, it’s immediately clear that he feels back on home turf at Exeter. “It has changed a lot since the late 1970s,” he observes, “but it’s nice to be back”. Lansley hasn’t visited as much as some of our other prominent alumni, but Exeter remains his political birthplace.  “I was elected Guild President and won by 12 votes,” he recalls with a wistful air, “I won mainly because of a lack of appropriate candidates”.  Perhaps less has changed than he might imagine. Indeed, in his time at Exeter, he may have had much in common with those currently stuffing Amory with anti-government WordArt. “I remember a sit-in protest that we did at Northcote House – I slept under the Vice-Chancellor’s desk,” Lansley chuckles. It might be only fitting then that the rebellious Guild President turned Conservative Health Secretary is given a taste of his own medicine.

Outside of his political activism, Lansley suggests he didn’t particularly shine as an undergraduate. “I was lucky to get in,” Lansley explains, “I didn’t get the grades but I got in anyway. I got C, D and E at A-Level, but (Professor of Political Theory then and now) Iain Hampshire Monk interviewed me and I got a place”. In spite of this, Lansley can’t help admitting that “political theory wasn’t so important, but my degree did teach me some good stuff about government and politics”. His degree did just that, taking Lansley all the way up the Civil Service food chain before his switch into politics. For many, it is his extensive time working behind the scenes which has given Lansley the eye for detail which has thrust him forward in frontline politics.

As a senior government bureaucrat, he decided to jump ship to work for the Conservative Party. “I was a civil servant,” he recounts, referencing revered political sitcom Yes Minister, “and I had to decide whether I wanted to be Sir Humphrey or Jim Hacker, and I wanted to be on the pitch playing the game rather than watching it from the stands”. Starting his new career playing political football, Lansley emerged from the tunnel to find himself facing the biggest match of his career, in the 1992 General Election. The stunning and undoubtedly unexpected Conservative victory rewarded Lansley with a place on the Tory A-list, a CBE and a minor stroke. “I was given a picture of my brain,” Lansley exclaims with alarming glee, “having pictures of your body parts is one of the weird parts of being a politician”.

While working for the Conservatives, Lansley remembers a young David Cameron working for him in his research department. Is it strange now to think that Cameron has asked Lansley to serve under him? “I can’t have been a bad boss then,” Lansley jests, with an almost uncomfortable chuckle. One cannot help but wonder if this extraordinary role reversal occurred to Lansley when Cameron replaced him with a new Health Secretary in late 2012.

Image credits: NHSE

Lansley’s time as Health Secretary has defined his place British politics. While Labour was in office, he spent six years shadowing the job yet lasted only two contentious years in government. “Politicians should do their jobs for a while and it makes sense for a shadow to do that job before they take it on in government,” he explains, at the same time noting of his own departure that “the ideas that one person could stay on as the Conservative health spokesman for a decade or more is ridiculous”. As the subject of scattered personal attacks, including the ‘Andrew Lansley rap’ and a relentless heckling from an elderly woman outside of Downing Street, hatred for the former Health Secretary has gone viral. Somewhat exasperatedly, he asserts that, “every Health Secretary has wanted to do what the same thing that I did”. His face slowly reddening, voice breaking into frustrated incredulity, he continues, “it is extremely irritating. Other Health Secretaries don’t get the ‘selling the NHS’ nonsense. If I’d done what other Health Secretaries have done, they’d be burning effigies of me!” Though Lansley has considerable knowledge of the symptoms and believes his reforms were exactly what the doctor ordered, the prognosis from the public was not positive.

As the only Permanent Secretary in the Civil Service to become a Cabinet Minister, and with the conscientious approach to match, does he resent his vilification in the media? “You have to be resilient,” he insists, “when you’re sitting round the Cabinet table, everyone has had this kind of attack. It’s not a matter of if, but when”. Unsurprisingly then, Lansley, himself going from Guild to government, is full of discouragement regarding a career in politics, warning simply, “Don’t do it. People go into politics for the celebrity aspect now, but people are used to having a go at celebrities”. While he’s no celebrity, Lansley has become regrettably accustomed to the chores of unending media attention and varying degrees of public venom, despite what we have found to be a decent, considered and mild manner. “Do politics because you believe in it, because you have the political virus,” the former Health Secretary pleads, “politics is not about self-interest, it’s about having inspirational ideas to try and make things better”. Lansley certainly understands those things better than most. For him, his attempted NHS reforms seem to be the culmination of a career founded in radicalism and guided by meticulous public service. Perhaps then, when our next Health Secretary is inevitably accused to trying to ‘sell off the NHS’, spare a thought for the former Health Secretary that was dead on arrival.

James Roberts, Features Editor

Find Exeposé Features on Facebook and Twitter.

Comment on Andrew Lansley MP

Dave Reynolds attended yesterday’s Politics Society talk with current Conservative MP and Leader of the House of Commons Andrew Lansley. Here’s what he made of it all.

Andew Lansley, current Leader of the House of Commons and former Secretary of State for Health gave a talk yesterday named “Life in Government”. Lansley is a former Politics student of the University of Exeter. He was also elected President of the Guild of Students during his time here.

“Throughout the questioning, it must be said that Lansley remained a calm and collected speaker, answering confidently on a wide range of issues.”
Photo Credits: Politics Society

He talked about his experiences as one of the most important members of the cabinet. He cited the media, judicial reviews, the strength of the civil service and Europe as the main reasons why politics has changed so much since the 1980s.

Without naming names, he believed that some politicians were in it purely for themselves but he wasn’t one of these.  In an unrelated story, in the parliamentary expenses scandal in 2009, Lansley was accused of flipping his second home, claiming thousands of pounds of tax payers’ money on furniture. All of this however, was well within the rules at the time.

While shadow health secretary, he accepted a donation of £21,000 from the chairman of a private healthcare provider. Such companies stood to be the largest beneficiaries of Lansley’s NHS bill.

The talk wasn’t the real reason why everyone attended. The Q&A session was always going to be the fun part. When asked for his views on the European Union, he categorically stated that he would be voting to stay in the EU in the proposed 2017 referendum. He stated that Europe being involved in our policy making process was a positive and that it would be wrong to make policy in isolation. However, he was sceptical of any more political integration between European states. He does not want to see a United States of Europe.

If he wasn’t a politician, he said that his preferred job would be as an archaeologist.

Responding to one of the questions regarding the NHS, Andrew Lansley told an audience member to read the Conservatives’ 2010 Manifesto. While this may be possible, it is very sad that the Conservative Party have deleted all press releases and speeches between 2000 and 2010 from their website and have also been hidden from search engines.  At the time of writing, Labour have announced that they plan to do the same. All a bit odd!

Throughout the questioning, it must be said that Lansley remained a calm and collected speaker, answering confidently on a wide range of issues.

Audience reaction from the talk was mixed. 3^rd year Economics and Politics student Nick Best thought “…the talk was really good. He dealt with the questions on the NHS from the members of Labour students with ease.”

VP of Politics Society Duncan Steadman said, “It was a great talk and I really enjoyed it. Hopefully we can get some more high profile speakers down to Exeter soon.”

John Chilvers was not so complimentary. He said, “[Andrew Lansley] didn’t answer the questions correctly. He tried to get around every question by avoiding the core issues. There’s a video of him saying that he wants to reorganise the NHS and yet today he says that he didn’t say that.  It’s very good of him to come down here but unfortunately he didn’t answer any of our questions and he was very patronising to the audience.

Scott Pepe thought, “… it was a very interesting talk. It’s great to get an Exeter alumnus down and a government minister. It was good to hear a full diversity of opinions represented in the audience and as President of DebSoc that obviously is what I really like to see”.

A big thank you to the Politics Society for organising the event. They are delighted to announce that you can now buy Winter Ball tickets online. Follow this link to the Guild website.

Dave Reynolds

Did you attend the talk? Is this a fair version of events? We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below or write to the Comment team at the Exeposé Comment Facebook Group or on Twitter @CommentExepose.

Stigma is Mental

Image credits: George Hodan

Yesterday, Thursday 10 October 2013, was World Mental Health Day. Following an article published yesterday for Exeposé Comment here, Online Features Editor Imogen Watson talks about the wider problems surrounding mental health.

Thankfully, I have never been unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with a serious mental health problem.

I have, however, struggled through what I would finally find out – two years later – was minor depression. And that was enough to change life as I knew it. The first year of university was probably the worst of my short life so far; I hated approximately ninety-five per cent of everything around me. I tried to fit in as I thought I ought to and felt like a fraud and a failure at the same time which only made matters worse. Second year was an improvement: I kept myself busy almost all of the time and spent hundreds of pounds and hundreds of hours driving up and down the M5 motorway home to see my group of best friends and, despite the exhaustion from making solo six-hour round trips in twenty-hour periods, I felt happy.

The summer of 2012 was a different matter. One overly drunken night led me back into a state of paranoia – that I was being ignored, left out, discussed and hated by my friends – for the next two months. I burst into tears incredibly easily and it was this fairly obvious change in character that led to heart-to-hearts with a wiser adult than me, one whom I trusted and for whom I had a lot of respect, and ultimately, a trip to the doctor’s.

My experience was, as I say, minor, although it did not feel as such at the time. I have come out of it well, too. But the problems occured there nonetheless. There was a lot of upset, both subtle and blazingly obvious. Among those apparent friends of mine, one of them was kind enough to tell me to “man up”, and that I had “chosen to act like this”. I only wish I were joking. By the end of the summer, I had lost a seven-strong group of friends; although I cannot comment on the attitudes towards mental health of every member of the group, the qualities the group exhibited in following like sheep was rooted in at least one person’s complete lack of regard for an illness that cannot always be seen.

Mental health has any number of triggers and manifests itself in a great number of ways. But, as Henry Sawdon-Smith said in Exeposé Comment’s aforementioned article, can you imagine a world in which people looked at you funnily, or rejected you for a job, because you broke a bone? Can you imagine a world in which there were adverts on the radio telling you it was “time to talk” about our hip replacements or twisted knees? You might tell someone you met recently about the time you fell down the stairs if it came up in conversation, but the time you felt so low you couldn’t ever see it getting better? Maybe not. The fact that we cannot see something makes it incredibly easy to ignore, and this is evident throughout the world: electoral problems in Zimbabwe, food shortages in Mozambique, natural disasters in Japan or Haiti or Bangladesh. Maybe we care for a short period of time, and then it is a case of out of sight, out of mind – if you will excuse the pun.

This inability to see a health problem makes it no less severe and no less common. The Time to Change campaign states that one in four of us will be affected in some way or another by mental health complaints, and that this type of illness accounts for a third of all illnesses; the likelihood is quite high, therefore, that you do already know somebody who has experienced difficulties, even if they haven’t shared them with you.

It is also incredibly easy to joke about. Some people, having suffered with these problems, enjoy the joke and it makes them feel “normal” (if such a thing exists). Asda recently was criticised for having sold a Hallowe’en costume of a white strait jacket, complete with fake blood and fake weapons under the name “Mental Patient Costume”. Tesco quickly followed suit in withdrawing their similar item. This perpetuation of nineteenth-century attitudes is what our society needs to stamp out. Perhaps a joke to one person, but to the weakest member of society it could be the final straw – this should be our consideration when we decide upon our standards.

These are not the only issues that comes with mental health problems. Currently, the NHS is strained to breaking point, and that includes their provisions for people with mental health problems. Thirty-four of fifty-one local authorities reported to BBC’s Newsbeat that they had cut funding for mental health services since 2010, with Derby City Council seeing a drop of forty-one per cent. A report for the Department of Health in August of last year also uncovered that after a decade of increasing spending, real-term spending on mental health, that is, once inflation has been accounted for, dropped for the first time since 2001, and by £150 million in England alone. Written complaints specifically about mental health services rose from 9,587 in the period 2009-10 to 11,749 in 2012-13 – an increase of almost twenty-eight per cent.

This is a dangerous concern as in an era of governmental austerity measures one can expect to see a massive boost in people needing their help. People lose their jobs, their homes, their families, and increasingly are trying to find ways to make ends meet. Charitable donations are often the first thing to go when personal savings have to be made, and organisations such as the Samaritans rely on them to stay open. It is not just members of the working world who experience difficulty; students too are prone to suffering with their mental health. Figures vary, although the Association for University and College Counselling estimates that between three and ten per cent of students will have some contact with them during their university career.

Amidst the doom and gloom, it is worth noting that attitudes towards mental health are, at least in my subsequent experiences with friends, improving. Considering how many of us go through such times, it is also worth noting the ridiculousness of keeping mental health a taboo subject – it is really helping no one. If you might permit me to speak as my first- and second-year self for a moment, take a moment to look around you, and among your friends. You could make a very big difference.

Imogen Watson, Online Features Editor

Contact Voice on (01392) 724000, or e-mail them at
voicemail@exetervoice.co.uk between 8pm and 8am; contact the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90, twenty-four hours a day.

A Decision Long Overdue

Meg Lawrence looks at the recent decision to allow same-sex couples to qualify for IVF treatment on the NHS and asks if this development should have happened sooner?

Here is a question: how do you judge someone’s potential to be a good parent?

A modern family: what defines a good parent? Picture credits: Romulo Fotos

According to some it’s simple; if they are a heterosexual, young couple, they tick all the boxes, but this is obviously an oversimplification of parenting. And clearly the latest NSPCC statistics are being ignored – as every ten days in England and Wales one child is killed at the hands of their parent. In almost two thirds of the 55+ cases of children killed at the hands of another person, the parent is the principal suspect.

But it is not the callous, cruel individuals who abuse their position of trust that many prioritise when they think of who should be prevented from parenting. It’s same sex couples and older parents.

The debate about who should qualify for IVF treatment isn’t anything new. But it’s about time we looked at the statistics and stopped judging people for an apparent – but unproven – inability to be good parents.

IVF treatment should have been available to same-sex couples on the NHS the moment it was available to heterosexual couples. Unfortunately, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) have only just allowed same-sex couples to qualify for the treatment on the NHS- a move that should have been taken years ago. Along with homosexual couples, women aged between 40 and 42 will also be eligible to receive the treatment, which usually costs between £3,000 and £8,000 a cycle.

NICE Chief Executive Sir Andrew Dillion stated that, ‘thanks to a number of medical advances over the years, many fertility problems can be treated effectively. It is because of these new advances that we have been able to update our guideline on fertility.’ This statement clearly applies to the availability of new treatments for older women, but does not explain why same-sex couples have been denied the treatment until now.

Treatment usually costs between £3,000 and £8, 000 a cycle. Picture credits: moyix

The process of IVF doesn’t change because of the patient’s sexual orientation- this shouldn’t even be a factor that comes into consideration when deciding whether a person can have children or not. Far more important is the love, support and care they will give to the child, and any person, gay or straight, should have access to any treatment that may heighten their chance of having a baby.

Dr Clare Searle said in a recent interview that the altered IVF guidelines are ‘not a response to social change’ but about taking advantage of clinical effectiveness. This point lacks any credibility- sexual orientation has no impact on how a person responds to treatment. As long as IVF has been available, it should have been available for couples of any orientation.

Clearly, social change has had an impact on these improved guidelines. The recent adaptation of gay marriage laws, allowing same-sex couples to marry in a church, has made society more aware of its still backward approach to homosexuality. Ideally, these developments will gradually lead to a more open-minded society, where points like these aren’t issues to be debated, but accepted ways of life.

The availability of IVF treatment for same-sex couples isn’t as controversial an issue as the legislation of gay marriage, because the church doesn’t have the ground to argue against it. If the NHS were a religious organisation, I’m sure they would’ve protested about the availability of the treatment for gay couples. This is so wrong. Frankly, I find it terrifying that an institution followed by so many can express such bigoted, discriminatory, small-minded opinions. I just hope people following the church feel they can make their own minds up about such important issues.

The idea that anyone could be against same-sex couples being helped in the process of having children is appalling. Parenting isn’t about sex. A person’s ability to be a good parent is in no way affected by their sexuality. A successful parent is caring, nurturing and giving. If a single mother or father can raise a child successfully, why can’t two mothers or two fathers do the same?

Many people argue that same-sex couples don’t provide the influence of the opposite sex in their child’s life. Other relatives and family friends can easily compensate for this, and parents adapt to fulfill any of their child’s needs. There were 22,331 children in the UK on child protection registers in 2011- perhaps we need to focus on the issues of parents who don’t deserve their roles, rather than those who don’t even get a chance to try.

Sir Andrew Dillon said that including same-sex couples in the IVF NHS guidelines for the first time ‘reflects the right thing to do.’ Hopefully this is one more step towards the complete eradication of homophobia. For now, it opens up opportunities for homosexual people that should have been available a long time ago.