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Surrey Hospital Petition

April 20th, 2007 · Posted by Skuds in Politics · No Comments · Politics

Last night we went out in Tilgate delivering UAF leaflets. There were 10 people who turned up and in little more than an hour we covered about half the ward. We could have done more, but I wanted to save some leaflets for Furnace Green.

After we had finished we found ourselves hungry and at the Tilgate Parade, which contains our favourite fish & chip shop in the town so we decided to treat ourselves.

While we were waiting I noticed a huge pile of hospital petitions on the counter. Nothing unusual there, every establishment in town seems to have had a pile of hospital petitions at one time or another, but this one was different; it was called The Surrey Hospital Petition.

As you can see in the Surrey Comet it says:

To assure the integrity of ‘The Surrey Petition’ it must only be signed once by those people who live, work or study in Surrey and who rely on Surrey’s hospitals, as well as the many people who have to cross borders into Surrey for their nearest hospital.

I/We are strongly opposed to any future closure or downgrading of hospitals and Accident and Emergency Centres in Surrey

Interesting. The copies circulating in Crawley have some extra text which more or less says how this applies to places like Crawley.

The residents of Crawley have been signing petitions about improving Crawley hospital or building a new one at Pease Pottage or elsewhere. If that happened it would greatly reduce demand at East Surrey Hospital and pile on pressure to possibly reduce services there. The MP up there, Crispin Blunt, has been doing everything he can to prevent any sort of development in Crawley which would represent a risk to East Surrey.

He tried to hamper our own MP’s attempts to preserve services and then made official complaints when she was successful in getting a moratorium on transfers. I am willing to go out on a limb and predict that he has signed this petition.

The way I see it, this petition is more or less demanding that Crawley hospital does not get re-developed, re-built or re-located, and yet dozens and dozens of Crawley residents are signing it. Did they not read it?

Or am I just getting the wrong end of the stick somehow?

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