Patients join East End GPs’ A13 traffic island demo over cuts
Nearly 40 doctors, patients and medical staff demonstrated on a traffic island on the busy A13 in London’s East End to show support for today’s national strike by public service workers.
Hundreds of drivers hooted and pedestrians shouted support as the banner-waving medics protested at the Commercial Road traffic lights (pictured).
A striking teacher had earlier given an impromptu talk to patients waiting for surgery at the practice in Limehouse about why public service workers were striking.
Many patients then joined the doctors’ lunchtime protest in the shadow of Canary Wharf when the teacher left to join the mass protest rally at Westminster.
“We decided to invite the teacher to explain why they were on strike because it affects many of out patients in the East End,” Dr Anna Livingstone who runs the practice told the East London Advertiser.
You may also want to watch:
“Bankers’ greed and the recession are not the fault of local people. The economy needs to be rebuilt by providing services and jobs—not cutting them.”
Four East End GP practices organised the protest on a traffic island they called ‘the faultline’ between the extreme wealth of Canary Wharf and the poverty of most of the East End.
Most Read
- 1 Cops break Covid-19 rules to have haircuts at Bethnal Green police station
- 2 Murder arrest after woman stabbed to death in Whitechapel this morning
- 3 Lovely Day for Aldgate School picked to sing on Billy Ocean's new single
- 4 'Grenfell Tower'-type cladding still not removed from New Providence Wharf after 3 years
- 5 Police e-fit expert retiring after 15 years at Bethnal Green
- 6 Covid hero who did charity walk in Bow aged 100 now has vaccine
- 7 Fury as family homes vanish when Isle of Dogs landlord converts to bedsits
- 8 Two men arrested after police officers assaulted in Limehouse rave
- 9 Man sentenced after teenage boy groomed on Snapchat to sell heroin
- 10 'Racist consultation' protest rejected on Tower Hamlets street closures as Labour sticks to its manifesto
“We are not on strike today,” a joint statement pointed out. “But our pensions are also under attack, while State support for the elderly is driving them into increasing poverty and benefits are being severely cut back—while we can look up at the towering banks and multi-nationals where a pension in millions is not unusual.”
The GPs’ protest also marked the 63rd anniversary next Tuesday of the founding of the NHS in 1948 and was aimed at highlighting their opposition to the Health & Social Care bill going through Parliament which they say “threatens the basis of the National Health Service.”