Boot out the private ‘vultures’
SAVE OUR NHS
A Unison health worker activist
March to save the NHS, 17 May 2011 , photo Paul Mattsson (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
The outrageous decision by the Tories to allow South London Healthcare NHS Trust, with a £69 million ‘deficit’ to go bust, contrasts markedly with the treatment of the banks. A relatively paltry £290 million fine has been levied on mega-profitable Barclays bank for rigging interest rates, adversely affecting millions of people.
So while bankers get bailouts, health workers and patients get to pay for them through grotesque acts of vandalism such as this!
These events demand a resolve from the trade union leaders that they will mobilise the ‘99%’- the majority population – in defence of living conditions through national strike action against this weak, discredited feral over-class and its government of millionaires.
The Trust, saddled with a costly Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deal, is threatened with administration, being broken up and “dissolved”, with its services being axed altogether and others being provided by the private sector. This represents a nightmare for service users and health workers alike. Furthermore, it takes place under legislation brought in by a Labour government in 2009!
The Trust hospitals include Princess Royal University Hospital in Orpington, Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup and Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich. 20 other Trusts, half of which are in or around London, are also considered financially unstable in their current form ie underfunded and bankrupted by PFI schemes.
Back in 2006 Barclays bank and ‘vulture’ capitalists 3i fleeced the public purse of tens of millions of pounds in their PFI build of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.
Fightback
The Con-Dems’ Health and Social Care Act aims to denationalise the NHS and, combined with £20 billion of cuts over the next three years will, if unchallenged, see the decimation of both health services and the hard-won pay and conditions of health service workers.
Health unions like Unison must urgently organise strike action on a national scale to stop this.
We can have no truck with Labour who accelerated PFI in the NHS when in government. Unison must demand these costly PFI payments stop, that the debts are written off and that all private health facilities, including PFIs, are brought back within the NHS, and are democratically run and fully funded.
Workers and service users must link up to oppose, by every means necessary, this transfer of wealth and resources from our NHS to greedy profiteering multinationals!
- For national strike action against health cuts. No to all cuts, defend pensions!
- Kick out private contractors. Nationalise all privatised services with compensation only on the basis of proven need. Reintegrate all outsourced services back into the NHS
- Nationalise under democratic workers’ control and management the banks and finance institutions and the pharmaceutical and medical supply industries
- For a fully funded and democratically run NHS
