Health fight goes national
WORKERS, MAR 2007 ISSUE
SATURDAY 3 March will see numerous events across Britain as campaigning against the continued drive by the government for greater marketisation and private sector control over the National Health Service gets under way. There will be rallies, demonstrations, pickets, conferences, marches, leafleting and other activities.
The various campaigns to defend the NHS all recognise that the only public service which is essential to everybody from cradle to grave is health care. The greatest concern is that the proposed model for future care proposed by the government is the US model, whose sole core is profit. Though ministers continually bleat that health care will remain free at point of need, the public purse is pouring billions into private finance schemes, outsourcing, marketisation, management consultants. The existing NHS deficits, totalling £1 billion, are dwarfed by the more than £45 billion being leeched away by private capital. But all the NHS Together unions know that a lobby of the House of Commons in November 2006 and a day to focus the public and politicians' minds – 3 March, a Saturday, ludicrously called "a day of action" – are in themselves not going to change the government's avowed direction of travel.
As Thatcher's repeated remark that the NHS was safe in Tory hands became a byword for deception, so Labour's repeated promise that it will not privatise the NHS is daily proved false. For example, Labour handed over the complete Lymington NHS trust to private contractors. It wants to place all NHS procurement in private hands. And so on. Faced with this, the NHS Together Alliance has to be a long-term one to win the hearts and minds of those employed in health care provision and those who survive by using the NHS.
The Alliance recognises that the new financial year in April will bring greater financial constraints on NHS trusts – more cuts, more closures, more redundancies. The drive to foundation status, setting competing profit-driven trusts against one another, will re-shape the NHS as the weakest go to the wall. The misnomer of "reconfiguration of services" across the country is rapidly seeing trusts merge and services being realigned geographically or on the lines of specialisms, the hiving off of shared services and cost cutting – all intended to ensure fragmentation and chaos.
Transfers to the private sector, especially to virulently anti-union multinationals, require the health unions to concentrate on maintaining organisation and relying on unity, not division. The campaign in health cannot be one of stopping cuts and retaining what already exists – too much rooted in the last century – but about determining what health provision is required for the 21st century and looking forward for the next 50 years.