17/01/2018 Party Political Broadcasts - Labour Party

It's just those times when you've been at work

and you literally haven't stopped, and then...

..and then, you come back the next night,

and you find out someone you'd spent all your time with has died,

and it's even worse when you think that, perhaps,

things could have been different, if only...

..you know, you hadn't been doing the job of two people.

We are now coming to yet another winter where all elective

operations have been cut this year.

Patients have been waiting and waiting,

and now they've been told they've got to wait even longer.

I've had people die

waiting for an ambulance,

where I felt that if we had got them to hospital,

they would have survived.

When I started training to be a nurse, we used to receive

a bursary, which didn't really pay us that much,

but it basically worked out to us getting around £3 an hour.

Now that's been scrapped.

People born a few months after me

will have over 40 grand of debt to sort out, as well as having,

you know, not a particularly sparkly salary.

I started nursing at the first hospital

opened for the NHS, in 1948.

Before the Health Service, there had been a lot of fear about being ill.

Even as a little girl,

I recall going to the doctor with my earache, and my parents

having to pay, and the chink as the coins went into his pocket,

and I realised my parents would have to go without something

in order to get me the care.

We are in the process of privatisation, and a key strategy

would be to make the NHS fail,

look like it's failing, destroy the trust the public have in it

and destroy the trust that the professionals have in it.

And then we'll be persuaded to call for something radical, and I think

that radical will be conversion to an American-style insurance system.

It's not a business.

We built it up with our tax so that our children

and grandchildren would have free health care.

Either you pay your rent,

or your council tax, or you buy food.

I've got colleagues that I work with that have got children as well,

and, to be honest, it's shameful when they say to me

sometimes they have to go to the food bank.

So, after...goodness, 20 odd years in the NHS,

I resigned,

and that for me was like leaving...

..leaving a family behind,

to leave the NHS.

And all of it, all of the working conditions together...

..been getting more and more feeling like...

..is this really worth it?

-VOICE BREAKING:

-Is this really worth it?

Because this is what I love.

But it's...

..it's not anymore, and that's really hard to say.

And I don't want to leave.

# In the eyes of all

# Have we lost our soul?

# Oh, and she can't let go

# Cos she loves it so... #

I'm interested in what Jeremy Corbyn has to say,

simply because he genuinely wants to help me do my job.

The press and the Tories said that these were radical policies.

In a country as rich as Britain,

where people are having to take second jobs,

working people are having to go on benefits and rely on food banks,

it's not radical to invest in the Health Service,

it's not radical to take away privatisation

from the Health Service, it's not radical to invest in us.

And now I'm back in the NHS and I want a Labour government,

I want a better NHS for my children's future,

and that is what will drive me forward and continue my fight.

You don't need to worry if you get a devastating illness and you have

no-one to look after you, because the NHS will always be there.

If that resonates as strongly with you as it does with me,

then you've got to get out there and fight for it,

and the first thing to do is to vote for Labour,

because they are the only party who are offering us, at the moment,

a real, tangible means by which

we can safeguard this most precious thing.

# Cos she loves it so. #