The National Health Service represents an essential part of workers’ so-called “social wage”. But since its inception it has been inadequately financed, its workers poorly paid and it has borne the brunt of social expenditure cuts. As far back as 1951 prescription charges were introduced by the “great reforming” Labour government of that time.
The history of the health service is a long and morbid one for the working class; now with the capitalist system in crisis, the whole of the public sector is being subjected to the most vicious cuts seen since the war.
The aim of these cuts is to solve the crisis of capitalism by freeing money for profitable investment. These cuts go hand in hand with the present income policy, the wage cutting £6 limit, and spiralling unemployment. All these government policies have one central aim — to make the working class pay for the capitalists’ crisis. The tactic the bosses use to implement these attacks is to divide and rule; resistance to these measures so far has come not from the official trade unions but the workers themselves.
In the NHS the tempo of attacks has been speeding up in recent months, especially in terms of closures and planned closures of hospitals. In London’s East End, already a depressed working class area, the Poplar, Bethnal Green, Invalid and Crippled Children’s, East Ham and Wanstead, and Connaught (Leyton) hospitals are all threatened with closure of some or all of their departments. Added to this, the East End has the highest unemployment and the heaviest education cuts in London. In Portsmouth; Clamorgan and Liverpool nurses are being made redundant. Everywhere a policy of ‘natural wastage’ and enforced retirements is being pursued.
There is considerable resistance to the cuts from hospital workers. At the Charing Cross and Hammersmith hospitals, workers are insisting that NHS patients should not bear the brunt of the cuts. They have banned work on private patients and are demanding their removal from NHS hospitals.
Pressure from workers has forced Barbara Castle to say she will go ahead with plans to phase out private medicine in NHS hospitals. But pressure from the bosses to hit the workers harder is far greater at the moment; so plans to give a bonus to consultants who work only for the NHS look as if they are going out of the window.
While the capitalist press has given massive coverage to the ‘plight’ of the privileged consultants and the effects that their sabotage will have on the already declining hospital service, the press campaign has taken the guise of ‘freedom against totalitarianism’ — freedom for consultants to line their own pockets at the expense of the working class and it is fired with hysterical headlines, like ‘Doctors to leave Country’.
It is true that the standard of service in the NHS has been declining but the deliberate policy of this government and past ones, Labour and Tory alike, has cause this.
For junior hospital doctors the story is different — a massive working week with pitiful overtime pay (having to be ‘on call’) has produced militancy and strike action not so enthusiastically covered by the press and TV except to say that it is a pity that there is nothing in the kitty to pay them what they want.
Pressure on the government to hit the working class harder and harder means that the class must organise to resist the cuts. Labour will never be able to give workers a decent health service so we must fight for it.
We must fight to restore the cuts, to reinstate all workers made redundant, to give all hospital workers a decent wage and to force a massive injection of money into the NHS to replace the hundreds of decrepit hospitals with new ones.
To win this fight we must link up with workers in other parts of the public sector and where possible with workers generally — for the NHS is the property of all.
In East London a trade union action committee has existed for some time, including in it representatives of several different unions. Public meetings and leaflets should be used to prepare the ground for the formation of a united front of workers around the demands to restore cuts in all areas and to protect them against further attacks on erosion.
We cannot depend on the union bureaucracy to fight for us
In many areas Local Action Committees of the National Campaign Against Cuts in the Health Service exist, drawing in workers from all public sector industries including hospital ancillary workers, doctors and nurses, and the campaign has been supported by the NUR and NALGO executives. This campaign has been formed out of the delegate conference of the MCAPP (Medical Campaign against Private Practice) in October 1975, and calls for a co-ordinated campaign against the cuts and a sliding scale of expenditure to combat the erosive effects of inflation.
We support the building of workplace based caucuses of militants to fight the Public Expenditure Cuts. These should be linked up on a district and national basis with trade union branches and Trades Councils where they are fighting cuts, and specific campaigns such as the local Committees against cuts in the NHS.
