Save our NHS
Alex Smith, Liverpool Socialist Party
Public satisfaction with the NHS has now fallen to its lowest level ever, 14 years after the Tories came to power.
The vast majority of the public still remain committed to the NHS’s founding principles – 91% of people surveyed believe it should be free at the point of service, and 82% said that it should be funded primarily from taxation and be available to everyone, irrespective of income.
But only 24% said they are satisfied with the current condition the service is in. For social care it’s even lower – just 13%, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey.
No wonder the public is fed up with the current state of the NHS and social care – these services have been cut to the bone by the Tory government!
That the NHS is on life support under the Tories – a party which openly represents big business – will not surprise many. Big business sees the NHS as an enormous potential market to be privatised and run for profit, not need.
Rather than being destroyed through privatisation and cuts, the NHS and other public services need to be fully funded and renationalised under democratic workers’ control. But we need politicians to fight for this.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is appealing to represent the interests of big business and it won’t fight for the funding our public services need. “There’s no magic money tree”, Starmer says. An incoming Labour government will not “turn the taps on” to reverse Tory cuts to local authorities either!
Starmer’s Labour won’t fight for fully funded public services, we need candidates that will. That’s why Socialist Party members will be standing in the upcoming May local elections under the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) banner. The working class needs political representatives who will fight to defend our public services.
The overwhelming majority of society’s wealth is in the hands of a tiny super-rich elite. What we need is socialist change, so that that wealth is put into the hands of the working class, who can then decide – with a democratically planned economy based on a socialist plan of production – how and where money is spent. That way, human need and public services can be prioritised, not the private profit of big business.
