Selling the Socialist: Supporting the campaign for a 15% NHS pay rise

Campaigning in Leicester (Click to enlarge)

Cardiff

The Socialist Party has been out in Cardiff continuing the campaign for a 15% pay rise for NHS workers. It's a disgrace that nurses and other health workers who have risked and, in some cases, lost their lives, will be 'rewarded' with financial difficulty if the government has its way. Health unions like Unison need a leadership willing to fight for fair pay. Good luck to Hugo Pierre in the Unison general secretary election!

Ross Saunders

Birmingham

We spoke to NHS staff, youth and key workers from all over Birmingham. They gave shocking insights into the daily realities of what our frontline services are dealing with - underfunding, understaffing and under attack from austerity cuts. Cheap claps don't pay the bills, don't feed your kids, don't keep you lights on - we need 15% for NHS staff now!

Join our community campaigns, trade union organising, and grass- roots activism, fighting for living wage jobs, affordable homes and fully funded services. Workers can't pay the price for a crisis we didn't cause!

Kris O'Sullivan

Coventry

Despite wind and rain, and fewer people in the city centre, we had a great campaign stall and completed two pages of signatures against hospital parking charges!

One young guy told us he had unfortunately lost his partner in hospital last week, after two weeks in the hospital. He signed our petition because when he went into the hospital every day for those two weeks, he had to watch the time he was by his partner's bedside to make sure he didn't spend more than he could afford in the car park.

You should not have to count pennies when you visit hospital. Not to visit an ill or dying relative, partner, friend, not to have treatment yourself, and not when you are the staff working there!

In 2018, car parks at Coventry and Warwickshire hospital trusts made £7.4 million in profit. The car parks only cost £1 million to run. We say, let's kick profit out of our NHS services, let's scrap the parking charges, let's have hospital services including parking built and managed for need not profit! Over two thousand people have now signed our petition.

Adam Harmsworth

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Finance appeal

The coronavirus crisis has laid bare the class character of society in numerous ways. It is making clear to many that it is the working class that keeps society running, not the CEOs of major corporations.

The results of austerity have been graphically demonstrated as public services strain to cope with the crisis.

The government has now ripped up its 'austerity' mantra and turned to policies that not long ago were denounced as socialist. But after the corona crisis, it will try to make the working class pay for it, by trying to claw back what has been given.

The Socialist Party's material is more vital than ever, so we can continue to report from workers who are fighting for better health and safety measures, against layoffs, for adequate staffing levels, etc.
When the health crisis subsides, we must be ready for the stormy events ahead and the need to arm workers' movements with a socialist programme - one which puts the health and needs of humanity before the profits of a few.