Health workers marching on the demo for the NHS, 4.3.17, photo Mary Finch

Health workers marching on the demo for the NHS, 4.3.17, photo Mary Finch   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Rich Edwards, Cardiff East Socialist Party

445 GPs quit in England in the last three months of 2016, according to NHS data. And two in five more plan on leaving their position, says a Department of Health-funded survey.

This is an indictment of an NHS being hobbled, hampered and destroyed by the greedy saboteurs in Theresa May’s government.

A demoralised workforce within a desperately underfunded NHS is being forced to leave a profession they trained for years to enter – a profession within Britain’s most treasured and vital public service.

Tory austerity attacks an NHS that is already suffering under the burden of the disastrous ‘PFI’ privatisation schemes expanded by New Labour. By 2014, the government had given £1.5 billion of NHS contracts to Tory donors alone, and nearly £9 billion total to their friends in the capitalist class.

All while the heroes who work saving lives in the NHS – like those in other public services in the era of austerity – are attacked by the Tories as the ‘greedy’ ones.

Corbyn’s Labour must be bold. His manifesto must promise massive increases in funding for the NHS.

Raise the stagnant and insufficient pay of workers in the public sector. Cancel the ruinous PFI debts which hang like a burden on NHS trusts and other public bodies. Full nationalisation of all NHS providers and big business in the health sector.

Socialist policies are necessary to defeat the greed, lies and propaganda peddled by those who seek to sell off our health service. Fight for our NHS, kick the profiteers out, and kick the Tories out of government this June!