Fight back against cuts and privatisation
Holly Johnston, Sheffield South East Socialist Party and chair of Royal College of Nurses South Yorkshire branch
Record-long waiting lists for treatments, people stuck in A&E for hours and patients treated in corridors.
We didn’t need the government-commissioned ‘Darzi report’ on the crisis in the NHS. The NHS has been devastated by funding cuts for years.
The report states: “It is not a question of whether we can afford the NHS. Rather, we cannot afford not to have the NHS, so it is imperative that we turn the situation around.”
How will New Labour’s Wes Streeting, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves attempt to cure the NHS? Starmer himself said “no more money without reform”. It is clear they will use it to try and justify plans to further outsource and privatise NHS services.
Health secretary Streeting has talked of a digital transition, shifting from hospital to community care and a focus on prevention.
A digital transition cannot replace the need to address recruitment and retention. Any transition should be decided on and run by the workers themselves and shouldn’t be another front for creeping privatisation.
Community care is vital for a healthy society and to ease hospital pressure. However there are no shortcuts and funding is needed in both primary and secondary care. In social care, devastated by council cuts, vacancies are as high as in the NHS, and conditions and pay are atrocious. They are under-unionised workers in a vulnerable position. No doubt Labour will plan to continue to syphon out parts of community healthcare to private companies.
And how is cutting winter fuel payments helping to prevent sickness? Or keeping millions of families in poverty by maintaining the two-child benefit cap?
Prevention is necessity for a healthy society. But the capitalist system makes us ill. Chemicals and hormones in food, poverty, pollution, inadequate mouldy housing, alienation and a mental health crisis, exploitation and a lack of autonomy of our own time and lives. Capitalism is driving huge increases in health inequality – life expectancy is decreasing.
A socialist prescription for the NHS would mean: reversing austerity cuts to services; kicking out all the profiteers, including by nationalising the big pharmaceutical companies under democratic working-class control; and tackling inequalities across society by fighting to end the rotten capitalist system.
The NHS remains a significant reform won by working-class struggle. But since its birth, the NHS has constantly been under attack.
Ultimately our class will always have to fight tooth and nail to defend everything we have won through struggle, unless we have fundamental change in society. We need to fight for the socialist transformation of society – to put the working class in charge of the vast wealth that exists, to democratically decide what we want, not what makes a profit for a few.
The Socialist Party fights for:
- A fully funded NHS and social care system run democratically by workers and service users. Immediate investment is essential
- Trade union struggle for NHS staff to restore the pay they need. A fully staffed workforce could meet the demands, work through the waiting lists and backlog, and reduce the rate staff are leaving. Abolish student fees and bring back nurses’ bursaries
- Renationalise the NHS. Kick out all the profiteers. End PFI schemes sucking millions out of our health service
