Britain: Fight to save the NHS

According to Blair's Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, the NHS is having "its best ever year". After nine years we should immediately recognise this Orwellian Newspeak. “Education, Education, Education” meant loans, fees, and trust schools. “Incorruptible” meant rotten to the core. Sure enough the Health Service's "best ever year" means a profound crisis. The NHS is more than £800 million in the red, hospital wards are being closed, and thousands of staff are losing their jobs. 7000 redundancies have been announced already, and the Royal College of Nursing estimates another 13,000 will go.

This is the direct result of importing the wonders of the free market into the National Health Service. Private health companies are being paid out of the NHS budget; PFI companies have got their noses in the trough; and new fees are being introduced for treatment, such as the £4,000 now charged for a “one-to-one” appointment with a midwife at Queen Charlotte's hospital in London.

Free health care was a huge conquest of the working class following the Second World War. Now it is being dismantled and sold off to the highest bidder, with various forms of privatisation offering lucrative rewards for private consortia of contractors, banks and construction firms. There are fortunes to be made out of the NHS, and not just those leeched off the ill health of working people by the multinational pharmaceutical companies.

What is left now of the promise of care from the cradle to the grave? Hospitals, schools and pensions are all in crisis. Blair wants to cut the incapacity benefit bill by forcing one million sick people back into work. The benefit system is too crude, the government claims. For instance, they argue, it automatically entitles all blind people to benefit! No matter how many times it is shouted at them by angry workers, the Blairites still do not know the meaning of the word “shame”.

Insecurity is what follows us from cradle to grave in 2006. The best this system could offer us in its “boom” years was the ability (if we kept our heads down and worked very hard, for very long hours) to trap ourselves in unprecedented levels of debt. Meanwhile, all around us, health, education, democratic rights and all the reforms for which previous generations fought are being destroyed.

Who benefits from all of this? The owners of the privatised companies, the PFI pirates, and the bosses of the big companies - the capitalists - are the only ones to gain. Capitalism is the guilty party in all of these crimes, and the Blair government has been their willing accomplice. The capitalist system can no longer afford the reforms it was forced to grant in the past, and one by one they are being dismantled, asset stripped and squeezed dry. This is an international phenomenon. It is important to understand the links between the assault on pensions, welfare benefits, healthcare and education in this country, and to see that these same attacks are being repeated around the world. It is not just Blair and co, but the capitalist system as a whole that cannot afford to maintain these reforms.

Capitalists’ only concern is profit

Capitalism is constantly searching for the economic equivalent of alchemy. They want to find a way - without the bothersome business of investing, employing and producing - to simply make money turn into more money. In PFI they have found their philosophers' stone. Through the various privatisation schemes Blair and co are redistributing wealth from the health budget to private companies and banks.

British capital's failure to invest over decades has reduced manufacturing industry to an empty shell employing just three million workers. One million manufacturing jobs have been destroyed during Blair's reign, the workers at Peugeot in Coventry the latest in a long line to lose their jobs. The feeble British capitalists have been reduced to squeezing their profits out of already existing production and services through privatisation.

Profits are the lifeblood of capitalism. The capitalists will not invest if they cannot make a decent return. For example, private rail companies do not repair and maintain track, killing people as a result, because there is no profit in it. So when you introduce the market into the NHS, the capitalists come running for one reason only, they smell an opportunity for profit.

Former Health Secretary Frank Dobson suggests that the current financial chaos in the NHS is a case of deliberate sabotage, preparing the way for even more widespread privatisation, even more opportunities for the pirateers to make a killing.

It is time to call a halt! We must fight now to save the NHS! Unison General Secretary Dave Prentis has promised to support health workers taking action against privatisation and job cuts. That action needs to be organised on a national scale. At the same time Unison must take the lead in organising a struggle against the Blairites inside the Labour Party.

The attack on the NHS is an attack on all workers and therefore the TUC should organise a campaign to defend the NHS beginning with a national demonstration. This month we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the great General Strike of 1926. The scale of the attacks now being launched against the NHS means that generalised militant action is required if the Health Service is to be saved. We should take inspiration from workers and youth across the channel whose united action recently defeated the government. If we fight like the French workers and youth, we can defeat these attacks. In the end we need to be tough not only on the crimes of Blair, but also their cause - the senile degeneration of the capitalist system. None of the reforms of the past are safe while capitalism continues.

• No to PFI and privatisation.
• Kick the market out of health care.
• For a fully funded National Health Service free to all at the point of need based on the nationalisation of the big drug companies.

April 26, 2006 

• Britain: NHS, a Life and Death Struggle by Stuart Knox (May 3, 2006)