THERE must be an election on the horizon. Jackie Baillie MSP has vowed for the fifth time to save the Vale Hospital. The GMB Union who are pro Labour and were also pro “Better Together” during the Independence referendum are also out lending their weight to the campaign. All very noble if it was not nauseatingly opportunistic politics from the Labour Party who originally started the cuts at the Vale Hospital, when they changed the Health Board area which was the trigger for the cuts to start. Labour’s position of arguing only for a North of the River solution which could mean the Golden Jubilee or Gartnavel, completely undermines the case for retaining and resorting key services like A&E, full maternity service, surgery and other key acute and support services lost over the years at the Vale Hospital.

This strategy is akin to throwing the towel in before you enter negotiations. Jackie and Labour will never argue for full re-instatement of key services at the Vale as this would make them a hostage to fortune in the unlikely event they were ever to be elected into power in the Scottish Parliament again. Many of us predicted when we were tagged onto the GG&CHB, as an afterthought, that all the lions share of any investment would be sucked into the big areas of population in and around Glasgow and we would be the country cousins getting the crumbs from that investment which has been used to centralise services away from the Vale.

These were political decisions made by Labour, not the pen pushers in the Health Board. As usual those of us who took this view were derided as scaremongers. People can make their own mind up.

The current SNP Government have also played an unconvincing role in protecting services at the Vale. They have had plenty of time to reverse the cuts implemented by Labour but have failed to do so and have allowed further cuts to be made by the health board. The overwhelming majority of local residents need services returned to the Vale and it reinstated as a General Hospital, instead of the clinic it is just now.

We also need democratisation of the NHS where health boards are scrapped and local people are elected and heavily involved in designing services for local delivery.

The future of the Vale will be a huge issue in the elections in May and local voters will not want to hear, from any politician, any more smoke and mirror posture politics but will be seeking cast iron deliverable guarantees that the Vale will be restored to a fully functioning General Hospital which this area so desperately needs.