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26/10/2009 by Steve Barclay.
Out and about in March and Manea this week-end. Give the after dinner speech at our March branch Harvest Supper on Friday evening, followed on Saturday by one of my regular coffee meetings held in Manea, and then pop over to March Rugby Club on Sunday morning to watch March Under 17s play a local derby match against Thorney.
The Harvest Supper was held against the backdrop of yet more worrying economic news. It is now the longest and deepest recession since records began with the sixth quarter of decline. Despite Labour spending like there is no tomorrow, printing money, and cutting VAT, the economy has still fallen again. France and Germany are now out of recession - so much for Gordon Brown‘s ridiculous claims that the UK was best placed to weather the storm. The drastic fall in sterling shows how false his claims are.
The coffee cluster in Manea highlights a range of issues. It is frustrating that whilst the local GP made a saving of £36,000 last year he only received £8,000 of this to spend in the village. The rest of the money disappeared once again into the PCT central pot - to be spent in the more affluent areas of South Cambridgeshire. When are we locally going to get a fair share of health spending?
Fenland has the highest number of teenage pregnancies, diabetics - especially in March, and heart disease in the County, yet we still receive less funding per head than South Cambridgeshire. It is typical of the top down command approach of Labour that when savings are made locally we are not rewarded by keeping this money. Last year of 42 dieticians in the County, only 3 of them were in Fenland and East Cambridgeshire. Such figures highlight the poor deal residents here receive. The PCT needs to move much quicker to address health imbalances between the North and South of the county.
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