What we think
NHS – not safe in their hands
DAVID CAMERON’S claim at the Tory Party conference to be ‘the
protector of the NHS’ is a sign of how far politics in Britain has been
‘Americanised’ – where two capitalist parties compete to sell their
particular brand of pro-market policies, but where there is no party
that represents working-class interests.
Cameron’s speech followed a series of opinion polls showing that
Labour’s 14-point lead in last year’s general election as ‘the party
with the best NHS policy’ had turned into a 2% lead for the Tories. In
reality, discontent with New Labour’s NHS ‘market reforms’ has made the
two parties indistinguishable in many voters’ eyes.
Cameron made it clear that he supported the use of private
contractors to provide NHS services. Nor did he drop the Tory Party’s
previous policy that every NHS trust should become an independent
foundation hospital.
Then the Tories’ chief policy co-ordinator, Oliver Letwin,
‘mistakenly’ told a Sunday Times interviewer that "there would be no
limits to the role of the private sector in the NHS".
But how could New Labour answer this? After all, just two weeks
earlier, the health secretary Patricia Hewitt said the same in a lecture
to the Institute for Public Policy Research, refusing to "try and set
arbitrary limits on one provider or another".
The reality is that, whichever of the capitalist parties is in
government – New Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats too – the
NHS is not safe in their hands.
But this does not mean that there is no prospect of saving the NHS
from the privateers. This was inadvertently acknowledged by Patricia
Hewitt when she recently admitted, after e-mails were leaked to The
Times, that the Health Department has drawn up a secret ‘heat map’
showing areas where there is ‘strong public unrest’ about NHS cuts and
re-organisations. The more ‘heat’ there was, the less likely it was that
cuts would go ahead.
The Tories complained that "clinical decisions were being overridden
by politics". But aren’t health service workers and users – the public –
the best judges of what services are needed? And with the convergence of
the parties, and the erosion of democratic control of the NHS, what
other way apart from ‘public unrest’ – including industrial action – is
there to defend services?
After another weekend of NHS protests, the BBC drew the parallel,
made previously by the socialist, with the mood that developed against
the poll tax in the early 1990s. Then, with local protests co-ordinated
into a national movement by the Anti-Poll Tax Federation (led by
Militant, the Socialist Party’s predecessor), Britain became one big
‘heat map’, compelling the Tories to retreat and scrap the tax.
The same is needed now. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) organised
lobby of parliament on 1 November – and the feeder march to the lobby –
must become the first steps to building such a movement.
And then there is the political vacuum. Ultimately, unless a new
political voice for working people is built, ‘Americanised politics’
will lead to an ‘Americanised’ health service, profit-based and
excluding millions from coverage. The battle to save the NHS is a
political battle as well, showing again the need to campaign for a new
trade union-based mass workers’ party as an alternative to New Labour
and the other pro-business parties.