Daniel Forrest, Teesside Socialist Party
Despite Labour’s near daily bleating about NHS waiting lists coming down, the reality is far from the rose-tinted vision Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer would like to portray. Waiting lists have decreased over the last year, but in March have begun to rise again, with the list now exceeding 7.4 million appointments.
Starmer and his friends in the Labour Party have little to shout about their record in power. They are hardly likely to sing from the rooftops about their inability to fill the over 100,000 vacancies in the NHS.
Rather than renationalising the NHS, improving wages and conditions for staff and providing necessary funding, Starmer and Co continue to pile pressure on existing staff to do more with less. It was a strategy that failed under the Tories and it will continue to fail under Labour.
Ultimately, the Labour Party continues to accept ‘donations’ from private healthcare companies (politicians call this lobbying, I might call it ‘legalised bribery’). Therefore, they cannot be trusted to act in the interests of the NHS or the working class. A proper socialist plan for the NHS would include kicking out the profiteers who steal funding away while services crumble. A fully nationalised NHS would take dentistry and optometry back in-house and run them on the principle of being free at the point of use, as had been originally intended.
This can only be achieved under real democratic control, with NHS workers, patients and local communities being at the heart of planning for people and not for profit margins. The Labour government doesn’t support that. Working-class people need a new party of our own, rooted in the trade union movement, as a fighting tool to save our NHS for good.
