Lauren Slawson, Liverpool Socialist Party
Cuts and privatisation have left our NHS hollowed out, overwhelmed, and struggling to cope. The inadequacy of the welfare system has meant greater health inequalities, as those in poverty are significantly more likely to suffer from health problems.
The Royal College of Physicians found 46% of doctors reported that half of their workload involved ‘illnesses linked to social factors’.
There have also been shocking increases in rates of poverty-related illnesses and disease, including respiratory issues caused by damp and mould in poor housing, as well as conditions arising from poor nutrition due to poverty, even cases of hypothermia due to the costs of heating.
This Labour government offers no solutions to the crisis and has been all too willing to pick up where its predecessors left off, continuing the austerity agenda. Further cuts and privatisation measures are threatened. In fact they are beginning to take steps further than the Tories even dared to, as their sadistic attack on disability benefits targets the most vulnerable.
This does nothing to solve the crisis in the NHS, or plug the £22 billion ‘black hole’ in the Treasury. These cruel cuts, in addition to previous, including scrapping universal winter fuel payments and refusing to end the two-child benefit cap, have revealed Labour as being willing to inflict more austerity and misery onto the working class.
Confidence in Starmer’s Labour government to create a hopeful or even slightly less dismal future has plummeted in less than a year of being in power. The working class needs a new mass workers’ party to fight all cuts to benefits and the NHS, reverse privatisation, tackle poverty, make the super-rich pay, and to fight for a socialist society.
