THE official figures for NHS trusts in England for the first three months of the financial year (April to June) have just been released after being held back until after the Tory party conference and the reason for the delay is obvious – the NHS is being systematically bankrupted by all the cuts to funding inflicted by Tory health ministers in the name of austerity.
These official figures show that NHS trusts have been forced to overspend on their government funding by nearly £1 billion in these three months, with NHS Foundation Trusts running up a deficit of £445 million and other NHS trusts a deficit of £485 million.
This massive deficit is over twice that for the same time last year. According to Monitor, the official regulator, the health service is now ‘under massive pressure’, facing the ‘worst financial crisis in a generation’ and trusts must make ‘radical and lasting changes’ to how care is delivered.
When Monitor talk about ‘radical and lasting change’, what they really mean is the complete destruction of these trusts, closing them down and throwing every hospital and service that remains open to the privateers.
Three years ago, the then-coalition government closed down South London Healthcare which ran three hospitals because it ran up a massive and unsustainable, as far as the government was concerned, debt – now they are planning to carry out the same closure plan but on a mass scale throughout every NHS trust in England.
This is the only course of action open to the Tories as they try and pay off the bankers’ debts at the expense of every public service. This war being waged against the NHS is being conducted by a Tory government that rules not from a position of strength but one of weakness.
It is a government with a wafer thin majority that lives in fear of the mass movement of workers that will not sit back and see vital services like the NHS privatised out of existence and a return to the days when only the rich could afford the best medical treatment.
This fear was demonstrated this week by the humiliating climb-down by the Tory health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, over the explosive issue of imposing a new contract on junior doctors. Hunt last week was threatening to impose the new contract on 53,000 junior doctors which would cut their pay by up to 30% while increasing their normal working week to 90 hours.
Faced with the most determined opposition and a ballot for strike action from these doctors Hunt has been forced to move from a position of refusing to budge an inch into offering concessions and guarantees that there will be no loss of pay or increase in working hours. The question of whether or not Hunt is really capitulating or trying to buy time to head off a confrontation is beside the point.
The main issue is that, in the face of a determined action by even a small section of professional workers, the Tories were forced to back-off, for behind the junior doctors is a mass movement of workers equally determined to fight for the NHS. This determination is certainly not matched by the spineless leadership of the TUC.
On the eve of the Tory party conference, the leader of the biggest union in the country, Len McCluskey, wrote a grovelling letter to Cameron offering to completely surrender the fight against the anti-union bill in return for minor concessions on electronic voting. Cameron contemptuously dismissed this ‘offer’ in the knowledge that McCluskey and the leadership of the TUC would do absolutely nothing except make empty speeches about the injustice of the bill.
Concrete action in the form of a doctors’ strike to defend pay, conditions and the entire NHS is entirely a different matter from such meaningless bluster and the Tories were forced to retreat. The lesson is plain, the junior doctors have shown the way. The TUC must be forced to stop talking about saving the NHS and to start taking strike action. Every closure and cut must be met head on, by the unions calling a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
This is the only way forward!
