Fight now or lose the NHS

Submitted by Matthew on 16 March, 2011 - 4:27

“Stealth privatisation.” A “plan to dismantle the health service”. That is what Lib Dem peer and long ago Labour minister Shirley Williams calls Tory Minister Lansley’s Bill to reorganise the National Health Service.

The Chairman of the British Medical Association has publicly denounced Tory plans for the NHS. On 15 March a 600-strong emergency conference of doctors voted to reject it and called on the Coalition government to withdraw it.

Most doctors agree with Williams that the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition is out to finish what Margaret Thatcher began in the 1980s — dismantling the NHS.

Lansley plans to lift the cap on private beds in NHS hospitals. He is encouraing non-NHS “providers” to muscle in and cream off the lucrative sections of healthcare.

Doctors say that giving GPs the disposition of 80% of the resources of health care provision will bring chaos. Inside that chaos, privately provided market-driven health care will advance.

This in time will reduce the NHS to the role of safety net provider for the poor with chronic diseases, those who would not be lucrative prospects for commercially-driven healthcare-for-profit companies.

This Bill is an enormous step towards something more like the unfair and murderously incompetent American system of “health care”.

There is overwhelming public rejection of the proposals. Last weekend the Sheffield Conference of the Lib Dems voted to reject the proposals.

The labour movement knows already what the Tories are doing, if not until now the details of how exactly they plan to go about it. For the labour movement now, the White Paper must be an alarm bell and a bugle. The alternatives before us are clear.

Either: the Tories and Lib Dem-Tories like Clegg, Alexander, Huhne and the hypocrite Cable, will be allowed to proceed with their dismantling of the NHS.

Or: the labour movement will mobilise itself and act to stop them, putting itself at the head off the large masses of non-labour movement people who reject the Government’s plans for the health service.

Act now, or we lose the NHS, the greatest achievement of the labour movement and the reform socialists in over a hundred years of working-class political activity.

The lunatic proposals to put profit in command of health provision in Britain is an issue that can put the labour movement at the head of the big majority of the people of Britain against the government. It will allow socialists to explain to the labour movement exactly what is wrong with this entire capitalist system.

What the Coalition plans to do is an outrage against political democracy, a slap in the face for democracy. They did not put these plans, or anything like them, before the electorate in the 2010 general election nine months ago. Cameron’s bland “caring” Tories didn’t do that, and neither did the junior-Conservative leaders of the Lib Dems. Nor did they put it in the Coalition agreement.

In the last months of the Labour government the Labour Party managed to raise something of an alarm about what the Tories would do if they won the election. Working-class memory and gut-instinct helped deprive the Tories of a Parliamentary majority. A lot of people sensed that a Tory government in this economic crisis would be as destructive as Thatcher’s government was in the crisis of the mid-80s.

The electroate did not give the Tories a majority. But the Lib Dems did and do. Nonetheless, in defiance of the electorate, they are proceeding with their plans.

What they are doing is known to be what most people in Britain do not want. What most people reject. What they will, given a labour movement lead, fight to stop.

But the issue goes much deeper than the question of political democracy. It raises the question of human equality. At the most basic level.

Healthcare, by definition, is a matter of life and death. Inequality in healthcare is inequality in the right to live and stay alive and healthy for as long as possible.

The then Labour government set up the NHS 63 years ago. The reform socialist Nye Bevan, who set it up, wanted it to guarantee universal, equal, state-of-the-art healthcare to every citizen, free to the user.

The Coalition is, deliberately and cold-bloodedly, albeit stealthily, trying to replace that system with one — market regulated healthcare — in which life and quality of life are things money, and only money, can buy. In which the lack of money condemns the sick to stark inequality — to lack of access to the best medical underpinning of life and quality of life.

It is a brutal assertion and underpinning of inequality. It is an attempt to reimpose market-regulated inequality in an area where the labour movement had secured, in the original NHS, the right to healthcare irrespective of inequalities in wealth. To reassert the privileges of money. Of the raw penalties inflicted on those who do not in a market-regulated society have enough money to pay. In this case to pay to stay alive and to stay healthy. And at the most fundamental level.

That outrages the feelings and beliefs of most people in Britain. On that level, even the Tories profess in general to believe in equality, and “equality of opportunity”. So, of course, and most stridently, do the Lib Dem-Tories who make this Coalition government possible.

That is why they are going about it by “stealth privatisation”.

They know they will not get away with it, if there is sharp, stark public awareness of what they are trying to do.

That is why if the labour movement spearheads and organises resistance — resistance, refusing to go along, not talk and protest in mere words — we can mobilise a sizeable majority of the public, including forces and groups normally way beyond the reach of the labour movement. Trade union action — occupations against closures of hospitals or parts of hospitals; Labour-controlled councils refusing to cuts; strikes — can be such a spearhead.

politics

The problem of the labour movement, faced now with the urgent need to resist the Tory drive to privatise the health service, is in the first place, a political problem. This Tory-led government is, obviously, political: it concerns itself with the overall running of society and with administering it. So too must any challenge to their right to do what the health Bill proposes to do. We need an alternative government.

Plainly we need a workers’ government. A government by and on behalf of the working class and the broader category of working people in Britain. A government that looks out for its own people, serves them, strikes at their enemies — what this government of millionaires is doing for its own, for the capitalist ruling class.

The Labour Party is right now the labour movement’s alternative to rule by the big and little Tory parties. We need a workers’ government; and our in situ alternative to the current government is a government of the Labour Party, only nine months out of office! That is the measure of our political problems in opposing, defeating and replacing the Cameron-Clegg government.

We must fight back despite that. In the course of the fightback socialists must work to renew the labour movement.

For sure even the lack-fire, lacklustre, lack-conviction Labour leader, Ed Miliband, is an improvement on Brown and Blair.

But Miliband’s Labour Party, even though it is the only alternative which the labour movement has for now, remains a lambentable and unsatisfactory alternative. Rooted in the past, and perfectly justified by the experience of the New Labour governments, many socialists choke on such a conclusion. “Leftist” disdain of the Labour Party is one of the great assets the Labour leaders have in this situation. It is a great weakness of the would-be left.

Only largescale, mass working-class action can defeat this government. And socialists are always concerned with the mass movement of the working class, no matter what level it is on at a given moment. We cannot in the short term go out and build a better labour movement. We have to relate to the one we’ve got.

The Labour Party remains, despite everything, the party of the unions. Socialists, like the labour movement faced with the Coalition government’s assault, have to start from where we are.

Socialists and trade unionists should turn their back on self-defeating snobbery towards the Labour Party. The unions need to reclaim the Labour Party. They need to use their strength in the party to restore and reshape it. For instance, the old power of the constituency parties needs urgently to be restored.

We must campaign in the unions for an urgent move to restore the old Labour Party, as a necessary part of organising resistance to the vandal Coalition.

We should not wait on such a restoration but take every action possible to us now. The trade unions, with their seven million members, have the strength to smash “stealth privatisation”. We can bring down this filthy government by millionaires on behalf of millionaires!

We cannot afford to wait on the leaders. If the leaders won’t lead then the rank and file must. Time is short.

The consequences will be terrible for the working class if we fail to fight the outrage to democracy, human equality and plain human decency that the Lansley Tory-Lib dem would make law.

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