WITH the dust barely settled on both the Labour and Tory Party conferences, the brutal reality of the economic crisis gripping British capitalism is already making a mockery of the ‘pledges’ being made by both parties that the NHS is ‘safe in their hands’.
Labour’s shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, pledged that a future Labour government would inject £2.5 billion into the NHS to pay for 36,000 more GPs, nurses and other health workers.
Not to be outdone, the Tories made similar pledges, without putting a firm figure on it, to protect the NHS budget in real terms.
Tory health minister, Jeremy Hunt, placed a caveat on this promise to put more money into the NHS when he said: ‘You can only have a strong NHS if you have a strong economy.’
Both Labour and Tories are in full agreement about what a strong economy means – it means cutting back the huge national deficit and paying off the massive national debt run up by bailing out the banks.
The question in everyone’s mind then is how do you put more money in the NHS while at the same time having as the number one priority cutting back on all public expenditure to pay off the bank debts?
The answer is simply that they have no intention of ‘solving’ the crisis in the NHS. The only crisis they are interested in is their own political survival.
Hunt made this clear when he announced at the Tory conference his plans to make GPs work seven days a week. He said that ‘securing the NHS budget is not about an extra billion here or there’ before going on to say that any increase in spending had to be accompanied by reform including greater use of the independent sector which, he insisted, did not mean privatisation.
Hunt reflected the great fear in the Tory party when he added that the threat of privatisation of the NHS ‘nearly cost us Scotland and we won’t let it poison the debate in England’.
What the Tories want and don’t want is irrelevant – the working class in Scotland and the rest of the country are not stupid. They understand only too well that the NHS is already being privatised and will be privatised out of existence by any government that has as its one single priority saving bankrupt British capitalism.
Figures released two weeks ago revealed that in the first three months of the year the NHS had run up a £500 million deficit, that two thirds of all hospitals in the country are in the red financially and that an immediate financial crisis is impending with analysts predicting that the gap between the cost of NHS services and government funding will be a massive £30 billion in the next few years.
This huge financial crisis puts into perspective all the paltry promises being made by both Tories and Labour.
The NHS was established in the 1940s under pressure from a working class determined not to see any return to the private medicine system that had existed before and threatening revolution.
It was built under conditions of a capitalist boom after the war, a boom built on a mountain of credit.
Today, when this credit has revealed itself as nothing more than debt, bankrupt capitalism has determined that it can no longer afford a public health service.
The crisis is demanding that for capitalism to survive, the NHS, along with all public expenditure on the Welfare State, be ended and health once more placed in the hands of the giant private healthcare companies that have been circling the NHS eager to feed on its carcass.
For the working class, there is no choice between keeping the NHS or saving the bankers and capitalism – it is capitalism that must go.
This means demanding that the TUC immediately call a general strike and hang a ‘do not resuscitate’ sign over the capitalist class by bringing down the government and going forward to a workers government that will use the wealth created by workers for their benefit and not for the profit of the few.
