THE president of the National Health Action Party dropped in on Redditch this morning to support his party’s candidate, local man Neal Stote.
Dr Taylor shot to prominence in 2001 in the battle to re-open the Accident & Emergency department at Kidderminster General Hospital, which had been closed due to health cuts in the year 2000.
He stood for election in 2001 and won a stunning victory by 18,000 votes, defeating the sitting Labour MP David Lock.
This time around he is giving his full backing to Mr Stote, the former chairman of the Save the Alex campaign.
Speaking outside the Three Cooks, he said: “We are fighting to save the NHS from the ravages of privatisation.
“The NHS must continue to be publicly funded, publicly provided and publicly accountable.
“If we lose that we lose the most important feature of British social life.
“The NHS together with education is the very thing that makes British society.”
And he said Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust’s (WAHT) decision to centralise major emergency care was counter-productive.
“The price of this decision is that it snags up the entire NHS – people are having to travel further to a hospital that simply doesn’t have the capacity to take them.
“Worcestershire Royal was built for the people of Worcester, not for the people of Kidderminster and Redditch as well.
“Who wants to vote for the Tories if they are thinking of the NHS?”
Mr Stote, who was later joined by Dr Santi Vathenen, a former Alex consultant and critic of the decisions of WAHT, added that his party’s policies go beyond the NHS.
“It’s about all public services. with strong public services we can have a better educated, better housed and healthier population which will feed into better economic growth,” he said.
“And it’s about all services, the police, fire service, it’s about building a stronger society.”
