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From Militant, No. 268, 29 August 1975, p. 3.
Transcribed by Iain Dalton.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Shop stewards in the Health Service are taking up the challenge of Big Business which wants to see the Health Service reduced to a skeleton to pay for the crisis in the economy. In the East End of London, district wide joint shop stewards’ committees are being formed for the first time and NUPE with the largest membership is leading the campaign.
Under planning procedures laid down by the Department of Health under the Labour Government, Health Authorities must now publish their plans for consultation with Community Health Councils, Local Advisory Committees, Local Authorities, Health Service Professional groups and the Unions. It is this ‘opening of the books’ that is in fact revealing for the first time to the workers the extent of the cuts to come arising from past and present economies.
This is bad enough, but what of the further drastic cuts to come and as yet unpublished by the Government? At present the management are avoiding referring to redundancies, but this is certainly what is in store for us.
The plans so far seen are the living evidence of Area Health Authorities and District Management desperately trying to prune services, close hospitals, sell off the land, in order to make ends meet. The Tower Hamlets District, with a major teaching hospital of 700 beds and nine other hospitals from 20 to 400 beds in size, last year overspent by £400,000.
The Health Service is just not getting enough funds to maintain existing levels of service. This District is now unable to replace worn out equipment. The only way the management see being able to make ‘progress’ is through reduced staff costs. Already, ancillary staff over retiring age are to be laid off. Already, 109 beds are closed off. Technical staff are being asked to reduce their establishment so that people who leave are not replaced. If these measures do not eliminate enough jobs, management will be looking at more drastic measures. It looks as though about 200 jobs will have to go just to make good the £400,000 rate of overspending.
The document we have seen also admits to the present total
inadequacy of the Community Services, where establishments are
already one third below DHSS norms and where even these
establishments are only half filled.
A document of the City and Hackney District proposes two hospital closures, the Eastern and the Metropolitan, together with a vast reorganisation of other existing hospital services in an attempt to absorb the workload of these two. A bulletin put out by the NUPE district stewards points out that these closures will lead to the loss of some 600 jobs and 520 beds (20% of Hackney hospital beds).
In order to explain to the workers the implications of these so-called plans, joint union mass meetings are to be called across the whole area in working hours and a day of action has been declared provisionally for October 9th.
Many Health Service stewards recognise, however, that defensive action against the cuts and closures is not enough on its own and that Health Service workers will need to draw up alternative policies, particularly in order to win the support of the Trade Unions and the Labour Parties. Such policies will need to aim at ending the private profiteering from the sick and also at democratising the Health Service.
The City businessmen and other appointed ‘experts’ who sit round boardroom tables deciding what sort of Health Service the workers can have must be replaced by democratically elected bodies. Militant’s proposals for management bodies in a nationalised industries made up of a third elected from the workers in the industry through their unions, a third elected from the TUC and a third from the Government can be adopted as a practical alternative to the present structure in the NHS.
The Health Service should be managed at all levels by, say a third health workers’ elected representatives, a third Government representatives to guard the interests of a centrally planned NHS and a third local working class representatives from the Labour and Trade Union Movement: Trades Councils, Tenants’ Committees, Consumers’ Committees, Patients Committees and so on.
Such demands can mobilise all sections of the working class in defence of the Health Service and towards the construction of a true Socialist Health Service.
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Last updated: 11 February 2017