A LEADING health campaigner has quit a protest group fighting to protect services at St John’s Hospital in Livingston, claiming Labour politicians are trying to stop concerns being aired in public.

Ernie Walker has resigned as chairman of the West Lothian NHS Campaign Group and vowed to set up a breakaway organisation.

The former NHS executive believes the future of St John’s is being undermined by the gradual withdrawal of services.

A leaflet he sent to fellow campaigners arguing the health board was downgrading services at St John’s “by stealth” has sparked a furious row. It prompted NHS Lothian chief executive James Barbour to write to MPs and MSPs describing the claims, which include accusations that management decisions about St John’s are taken in Edinburgh, as “inaccurate and misleading”.

Mr Walker is understood to have been lambasted by Labour Party members at a later campaign group meeting.

He said the meeting “degenerated into a slanging match between Labour Party politicians and the lay people present, including myself.”

Among those who attended the meeting were Labour politicians Jim Devine MP, Bristow Muldoon MSP and West Lothian council leader Graeme Morrice.

Mr Walker said today: “Having reflected about this turn of events, it is now apparent to me that the Labour group was seeking to prevent the dissemination of information into the public domain.”

He now intends to establish a new pressure group which he claims will be free from party political influence and will hold its first public meeting on Thursday.

At least 20 supporters of the existing campaign group are expected to follow Mr Walker, who was chief executive of the Mayday University Hospitals Trust in Croydon before joining the private health sector as a management consultant.

The original campaign group was founded amid fears that St John’s Hospital would be downgraded after emergency surgery and trauma orthopaedic services were transferred to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Despite repeated strong denials from NHS Lothian, Mr Walker and his supporters believe services at the West Lothian hospital are being slowly undermined.

He said: “The campaign committee has seen evidence of a continued and progressive downgrading of hospital services.

“However, any attempt by lay people to broadcast this information is met by acrimony and dissent.

“The time to publicise health issues is in the run-up to the forthcoming Scottish Parliamentary election in May. Labour appear resolutely opposed to this.”

Labour councillor Morrice, who is also a member of the health board, strenuously denied claims the campaign group was acting on a Labour Party agenda and pointed to its cross-party support.

He said: “It’s sad and disappointing that an individual member of the campaign group has decided to set up his own personal campaign group.”

Mr Walker’s new group will hold its first public meeting at the Beefeater Travel Lodge at Deer Park in Livingston at 7.30pm on Thursday when its constitution and name will be decided.

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NEW DELHI, Feb. 26 (UPI) — State-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp. has appointed global reservoir consultant DeGolyer & McNaughton to audit the wells it will drill.

ONGC has taken this decision to avoid criticism that it has been deviating from its exploration and production expertise activities.

A company spokesman said the decision to appoint a third-party consultant to audit its wells was taken in view of the growing competition in the oil and gas sector.

The consultant was also appointed to avoid incidents of high input costs on exploratory wells. To deal with such situations, ONGC decided to appoint a third-party audit system, he said.

“The Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry had in January this year given us a suggestion to adopt third-party audit system,” the spokesman said.

He said following detailed discussion on the matter, an apex committee of the government-controlled oil and gas giant OK’d D&M as the third-party auditor.

ONGC has said it is committed to the highest principles of corporate governance. It said the move to hire was to increase transparency.

“AS A politician I have never sought the public eye for its own sake,” Gordon Brown proclaimed yesterday, highlighting his pride in being a man of substance over style.

But observers thought his aides had taken this sentiment a little far when the would-be Prime Minister’s face was obscured by a misplaced autocue stand for the most important speech of his political life.

At both sides of the lectern, Mr Brown was flanked by two clear screens that partly hid his made-over face and new hairstyle. When the Chancellor took questions from the journalists, the first was from the BBC’s Nick Robinson, who said: “I can’t see you, can you see me?”

Broadcasters grumpily reported that they had been told to place the cameras at that angle by Mr Brown’s apparatchiks. Even the assembled journalists in the aptly named Imagination Gallery in central London could not see Mr Brown over the heads of the Labour supporters.

Lindsay McGarvie, of media training and public relations firm McGarvie Morrison Media, said the message had literally been overshadowed by the screens. “It was unfortunate that the speech was marred by the technical glitches and autocue. But it was a speech where Brown was making it clear he was more interested in substance rather than presentation and style. The reality is a lot of commentators will focus on that autocue.”

Neil Rafferty, a political public relations experts, said the autocue glitch showed that the Brown camp was “amateurish” compared to Blair’s media machine. “The most important people in that room were not the Labour Party cheerleaders, but the camera operators. His message was clear; unfortunately our view of him wasn’t.”

Simultaneously, broadcasters were showing a split screen with Tony Blair, the master showman, at a ceremony at Wembley Stadium. It seemed even in his last days of power, Mr Blair was deemed a big enough star to divert attention away from his successor.

Despite Mr Brown’s insistence that politics “is not about celebrity”, when he is up against David “WebCam” Cameron at the next election, he will have to learn that nor is it about obscurity.

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