The Socialist 21 July 2010

Warning: NHS under attack

Warning: NHS under attack

Youth and students: organise to fight for a future

Class struggles on the rise

Stand united, fight the cuts!

Lessons of the cuts

Education workers must teach Tories a lesson

Fast news

Union recommends BT pay deal

Stop the courts closures

Wales: No to fire service cuts

Strike action wins at Tube Lines

Swansea Linamar

Cuts blogger!

PCS: a strategy to stop the cuts

TUC refuses national demo

Unite the struggle to defend pensions

Con-Dems propose denationalisation of the NHS

The Socialist Party needs you!

More join the Socialist Party in Yorkshire

Funding the socialist fightback

Building new workers' parties and the tasks of socialists

Egypt: Thousands protest over brutal police killing

Harder work, longer hours... All part and parcel?

A testing 'pudding' for councillors

Keep probation services public

Previous issues, etc

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Reader's comment

Lessons of the cuts

I WAS born in 1936 and grew up with the welfare state, together with the nationalisation of many of the power industries. We took it all to be our right: free health care, council houses and subsidised rents, grants for higher education, and a network of welfare help for all those who needed it - the elderly, the disabled, big families, etc. This was our right, just as the railways, the gas and electricity, the water etc belonged to us.

When Mrs Thatcher 'sold the family silver' we had a rude awakening. Flush with the new freedom of credit facilities, some enjoyed the process of buying their council houses - until the crash began. Capitalism collapsed and now we are all being made to pay for it.

They are grabbing our health service and our welfare system to pay for their dishonesty and failure. Years ago we didn't know they could do that.

We should have seen that these major changes were vulnerable to attack. The creation of the welfare state should have been accompanied by a democratisation of power and decision-making, so that what was created could be sustained by the many and could never be taken away.

This, I have learned recently (although I'm a lifelong socialist), is what Trotsky meant by the permanent revolution.