A socialist NHS?

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STOP THE PICKET the Cardiff NUPE No. 3 branch, who recented defeated an attempt to victimise him spoke to a meeting organised by Cardiff Labour Briefing to discuss 'Why we need a Socialist Health Service' • This is an edited version of his speech.

THE aim of this meeting is to discuss how we can take our response to the relentless Tory attacks on the NHS beyond a merely defensive fight.

If we are to convince people that the NHS is worth defending then we must go beyond what we already have and fight for what we need - a socialist health service that meets real needs.

I must admit, this is particularly daunting after the decision today by South Glamorgan Health Authority to mount such a massive attack on the service by privatising most of the ancillary jobs. But, in a situation like the one we are faced with, it is all the more necessary to spell out the alternatives.

Privatisation holds within it all of the Tory attitudes to the NHS. It replaces the notion of public care with the idea of large Colnks one of the biggest areas of state expenditure. It drives wages even lower than the pathetic Whitley Council rates. It is, probably, a bigger attack on trade union rights than GCHQ, because no contractor is going to tolerate a union.

Pinally, it means cuts in the level of service on an unprecedented scale, because NHS workers will be forced to cut corners on staffing and conditions to compete for their own jobs.

All of these capitalist reasons for privatisation need socialist answers because it is becoming more and more difficult to defend the status quo.

Cash limits

It was Labour minister David Ennals who, eight years ago, introduced "cash limits" to reduce NHS spending. After all, it is less politically embarrassing to cut £50 million from a budget than to announce you are going to do away with 50,000 beds.

Four years ago, the Tories took up where the Callaghan government left off, and they've been cutting ever since.

Just after he came to office, Patrick Jenkin, the Tory Secretary of State for the Social services rejected the findings or a government commission, the Black Report, as "quite unrealistic"

The Report found that in all areas of illness and death. working dass people get a Forse dea for she NHS than other :asses.

We is: 25. 1 =ise dea TUTE =2 I2 T 22E 7: = ETi= - 30707 22 JEE DETESt nor an adequate servie. 20T does it cater for the changing health needs of our society. But what must have really stung the Tories was the fact Rita Marim (rioht and athoro 13334MTaT (right) and other that the Report pointed the finger very firmly at poverty as the main cause of this inequality.

Low pay

It picks out stress caused by low pay and unemployment as a major cause of disease and it puts forward an 'anti-poverty strategy' costing £300 million a year. It also argues for a shift away from the prestige and status of hi-tech medicine to prevention and a community based service.

Of course all of this had been said already by socialists, but Black gave it enough weight to turn it into the basis for most Labour Party and NHS union policy. In fact, in the last four years, 'prevention organisation like the BMA can call for 4,000 more General Practioners (GPs) to be trained in the next ten years and a switch of resources away from hospitals to general practice.

Britain's 29,000 GPs deal with most of the illnesses with 6% of the resources while hospitals deal with only 2% of illnesses and get the bulk of resources.

What underlies the bias €7m scandal THE National Health Service' is being looted of £7 million a year by the London Rubber Company.

A report in the Observer (April 1) reveals that the LRC has kept a contract to supply surgical gloves to the MHS thanks to the help of Ee I top civil service DSO0I 1RC: p0rg 505 53 20r= IN SURE I Tits all such profiteering by opening the books of the Health Service and revealing the full details of all the gain made from it by private suppliers. ITS NHS trai towards acute medicine is the power of the upper reaches of the medical profession. These obscure figures sit on Health Authorities of course, but; more importantly, they set the terms for the whole decision-making process. Within the overall financial limits, they say who gets what treatment where, when and how much.

The power of this reactionary group made Nye Bevan back down in 1946 when he •filled their mouths with gold" to stop them wrecking the NHS. It also ensured that the Wilson government in 1964 failed to challenge the existing structure of the service, despite all the guff about the 'technological revolution' The same power has turned the NHS into a conduit pouring guaranteed profits into the pockets of the drug companies and suppliers like BOC.

Unless it is seriously challenged it will ensure that Labour Party policy on the NHS will stay just that -policy:

A recent Labour Party circular concludes: "An important aspect of the 'Save Our Health Service' campaign is to move beyond a mere defence of the cleave oi ment of the NHS."

Weight that against Neil Kinnock's statement to the Perth conference of the Scottish Labour Party recently where he said: '*We are not going to be able to sav 'ves' to peery hing lass o Bood there promises :: prevents us from being ==.= : fifi bardi! any of mmm Leapese =355leadership is let io its own devices?

That private companies should make profits out of illness is certainly wrong. But JULIUSUN S West London we must go beyond apolitical moralising.

We must also get away from the idea of the welfare state as a safety net for the old, the poor and the sick: We must point out that people get sick, age prematurely and fall into poverty precisely because we live in a capitalist society, and not because they happen to be less fortunate than others. What else should we expect under a system where the profit motive permeates every aspect of our lives - and deaths?

Defending and extending the NHS is the immediate aim, but in itself, this is not socialist — it only becomes so when we link it to a wider anticapitalist perspective.

Right now this is very easy. The Tories are determined to hand the NHS over to contractors and they are just as determined to stamp out any opposition so that the slightest resistance to them becomes a fundamental challenge. In his pressure cooker it is the ob of socialists to draw out the political implications of the Victim of Solidarity won Anwar Ditta's fight campaigns against the cuts and privatisation.

Any fight about staffing levels, for example, begs the question, whose staffing levels — ours or theirs? What levels do we think are safe, and what levels are needed to improve the kind of care that patients get?

A fight over the closure of a small, geriatric hospital like Thornton View in Bradford means a fight for a more caring approach to the nursing of the elderly, away from the distant, multi-storey car parks they call modern hospitals.

The Thornton View occupation shows that health service workers, along with relatives and the local community, are the best people to run hospitals and the health service.

Our job is to tie in the demands that arise naturally and inevitably out of these struggles and combine them with the kind of working class socialist policies that will transform the NHS. We must provide a bridge betweer now and the future - otherwise we will have no future.

THE Home Office has decided to proceed with the deportation of Vinod Chauhan.

Vinod fell foul of the racist immigration laws because his marriage to a British woman broke up.

Vinod has had strong support from the local labour movement and community organisations in Tameside, Greater Manchester, where he lives.

For further details and offers of support, etc., contact: Vinod Chauhan Defence Campaign, c/o 18 Firs Av enue, Ashton-underLyne, I ancs. Tel: 061 330 5784 or 061-226 1751.

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Il. port for what the council is int reiected Neil Kinnock's The hudant ON Thursday 29 March Liver- • Thursday 29 March Liverpool's biggest general strike since ol's biggest general strike since 1945 took buses off the roads, 45 took buses off the roads, trains off the tracks, closed uns off the tracks, closed schools and council offices and lools and council offices and brought the city to a near stand- ought the city to a near standstill.

The Liverpool labour move- doing. The Liverpool labour movement rejected Neil Kinnock's advice that the council should do the dirty work for Thatcher and cut workers' living standards by raising rents and rates.

At the Liverpool-Everton Milk Cup final at Wembley, a section of the crowd saw Kinnock and started shouting: "How did you get in? Don't you know we're all socialists here?" A sign of the times.

Kinnock may not have been prepared to support Liverpool Labour Council's stand, but 30,000 council workers were, and were other sections of Tne working class in the state and Bas Hardy reports from Liverpool port for what council is the doing.

The budget strategy is a plain ordinary "common-sense' response of honestly motivated working class people to the devastation that capitalism has inflicted on Merseyside. The strategy was best summed up by Tony Byrne, Chair of the Finance Committee: The issue is about jobs and services. The budget is no more than that."

"Since 1979 Liverpool has lost 40,000 jobs in the private sector, 5,000 jobs at the Town Hall. There are 60,000 unemployed in the City, and in parts of Liverpool youth unemployment is running at 90%.

"I believe it's a crime for one Primo Socialist Organiser no. 173. April 4 1984 Page

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