Campaign to save Lynn's QEH goes shopping for support at Wisbech
Saturday shoppers queued up to sign a Valentine’s Day message to Health Secretary Stephen Barclay when Save the QEH campaigners from King’s Lynn and local trades unionists rallied in Wisbech.
Their message: “Show us some love and fully fund a new hospital.”
The Market Place protest was part of an ongoing two-year local campaign demanding action over the crumbling hospital building where more than three thousand props are holding up the roof, patients and staff are daily at risk and operating theatres have had to be closed for safety reasons. It is the most propped hospital in the country.
Wisbech March and District Trades Council members representing unions including Unite, Unison and the NEU joined the demands for a new hospital and also leafletted in support of striking nurses and all workers in the NHS.
Trades Council secretary, Nick Williams, said: “Everyone knows that the QEH is falling down but month after month the government has nothing to say about it.
“Fenland people were queuing up to sign their personal protests to Stephen Barclay. We couldn’t keep up with the numbers.
“The state of our hospital is as bad as the state of our NHS. The Trades Council has written to Stephen Barclay and told him that the current crisis has been building up for years, while he was a health minister and now while he’s health secretary.
“It’s the result of more than a decade of underfunding and withdrawal of resources.
“Our letter said it’s now time he stopped playing politics and got on with the real business of government.
“We demanded that he sits down and talks seriously with the health unions about how he can meet their members’ concerns. He hasn’t replied.”
Saturday’s action drew wide support from hundreds of shoppers many of whom talked movingly about how important the QEH has been to them. Others took ‘Support the NHS’ posters for their windows.
The contingent included about half a dozen people who had come across from West Norfolk into Fenland to support Saturday’s rally.
They included Jo Rust who has spearheaded the Save the QEH campaign.
