workers and middle class people are on the march throughout Britain to defend the National Health Service.
The Blair/Brown government’s ‘reconfiguring’ of over one hundred of Britain’s 200 NHS district general hospitals, closing their A&E and maternity units, is being fought by health workers and local communities all over the country.
However, thousands of nurses, doctors and other health workers have already been sacked or face the sack.
Wards and whole hospitals have been cut or closed or face this in the coming months.
In the face of the Blair/Brown offensive, the reformist trade union leaders have collapsed, begging the government to ‘slow down’.
The death agony of Capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Programme) is the founding document of the Fourth International, of which the Workers Revolutionary Party is the British section.
It points out that in periods of acute class struggle the leading bodies of the trade unions aim to become masters of the mass movement in order to render it harmless, adding that in time of war or revolution trade union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers.
On 1 October NHS Logistics was privatised, the first privatisation of an entire NHS department so far.
A few days beforehand, on 26 September, the health unions won the battle at the Labour Party conference with two overwhelming votes against the Blair/Brown leadership, opposing any more NHS privatisations.
The whole country expected action to stop the privatisation of NHS Logistics just a few days later.
But no action came. The UNISON leaders allowed NHS Logistics to be privatised and nothing has been heard of the issue since.
This cowardly conduct encouraged the government to be even bolder.
US deputy health secretary Azar visited Britain in November, insisting that US drug companies be allowed to take over the ‘NHS market’.
Boasting that he had had ‘some great discussions’ with Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt when she visited America, Azar demanded US-style medical insurance be introduced in Britain.
Far from ‘slowing down’ Blair declared in November that the next three months will be ‘crunch-time’ for the NHS.
Hundreds of thousands of workers have also been sacked in manufacturing industry in recent years, with the reformist trade union leaders hypocritically bleating that the government must do something, while at the same time, most notably at Vauxhall Motors and Rover, working might and main to ensure that the mass sackings went through.
At Gate Gourmet at Heathrow Airport in August last year, when the bosses sacked 800 workers by megaphone, more than 1,000 British Airways workers came out on sympathy strike for two days.
The BA workers only went back to work after the leader of their union, Woodley, the betrayer of Vauxhall and Rover, ‘repudiated’ them and threatened that they faced the sack and would get no support from the union.
Woodley and the reformist TGWU bureaucracy then formulated and signed a ‘Compromise Agreement’ with Gate Gourmet management, which they hoped would become the ‘Gold Standard’ for future deals on the airport, particularly with British Airways.
The Compromise Agreement involved the introduction of a slave labour ‘Survival Plan’, savaging jobs, wages, conditions and pensions.
It allowed the company to select who it would ‘re-engage’ and who would be offered a pittance of ‘compulsory compensation’, on condition they signed a declaration that they would never take legal action against Gate Gourmet or work at any Gate Gourmet-related company in the future, effectively, that they would never work at Heathrow or any other airport again.
To their great credit, the locked out Gate Gourmet workers rejected the Compromise Agreement and are currently going through with their Employment Tribunals against the company, fighting for reinstatement on their original terms and conditions.
The Gate Gourmet struggle is linked with the wider struggle at Heathrow, where more than 20,000 British Airways baggage handlers, check-in staff, pilots and others, face the same treatment as their colleagues at Gate Gourmet.
BA intends that pensions must be savaged, that the move to Terminal 5, involving ‘grappling with new technology’, means the sack for thousands of check-in staff, baggage handlers, loaders and cabin crew, and massive speed-ups, wage cuts and pension cuts for those who remain.
The defence of the NHS and the defence of jobs and working conditions is a life and death matter for the working class which the reformist trade union leadership of Prentis, Barber, Woodley and the rest have betrayed and will only betray.
Only through building the revolutionary leadership of the ICFI and the WRP can the working class defend its services, jobs and conditions, by organising a successful socialist revolution and going forward to power and socialism.
The chapter in the Transitional Programme, Trade Unions in the Transitional Epoch opens: ‘In the struggle for partial and transitional demands, the workers now more than ever before need mass organisations, principally trade unions. . .
‘The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class.
‘He takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy.’
Warning against ‘ultra-left doctrinaires who have been teaching that unions have outlived their usefulness’, the Transitional Programme insists: ‘self-isolation of the capitulationist variety from mass trade unions, which is tantamount to a betrayal of the revolution, is incompatible with membership in the Fourth International’.
However: ‘Trade unions do not offer, and in line with their task, composition, and manner of recruiting membership, cannot offer a finished revolutionary programme; in consequence, they cannot replace the party.
‘The building of national revolutionary parties as sections of the Fourth International is the central task of the transitional epoch. . .
‘Sections of the Fourth International should always strive not only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists, but also to create in all possible instances independent militant organisations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society; and, if necessary, not flinching even in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade unions.’
We enter the struggle to defend the NHS, in a period where it can only be defended, maintained and developed by getting rid of bankrupt British capitalism – which is determined to destroy it – and go forward to socialism.
Guided by the method of the Transitional Programme we defend the NHS by boldly and resolutely organising those millions who want to defend the NHS but whom the trade union leaders refuse to lead.
We call for them to go beyond protest actions, and to begin to take the necessary measures to defend hospitals, and stop closures through using the power of the working class, in a way that will bring the masses face to face with the issue of removing the union leaders, bringing down the government and going forward to socialism.
Since the trade union leaders have not the slightest intention of stopping NHS cuts and closures the masses of workers must be mobilised boldly to defend the NHS.
This means that local trade union branches, and where possible national trade unions, must mobilise in every town, city and locality to form Councils of Action.
These Councils of Action will be made up of the local trade unions and all community, and youth groups and political groups campaigning against NHS closures and NHS privatisation.
The Councils of Action must take direct action to stop ward closures and cuts of all kinds and hospital closures. They must occupy the threatened hospitals and place them under workers control.
Attempts to break occupations must be answered by strike actions by workers and mass mobilisations of workers and youth to defend the occupations .
This will begin the formation of a movement of millions, which will force the union leaders to call national and general strike actions by the trade unions, and chase those leaders who won’t out of office.
One of the results of such action will be a massive growth in the strength of the WRP and Young Socialists.
The defence of jobs, conditions and pensions at Heathrow Airport, and everywhere else, must be carried out along the same bold and resolute lines.
The eruption of the masses once begun must be continued and led by the revolutionary party to bring down the Blair-Brown government and to go forward to a workers government that will be based on the councils of action.
Such a government will expropriate the banks and the drug companies to maintain and develop the NHS, as the jewel in the crown of a planned socialist economy in a socialist Britain.
Trotsky in the Transitional programme deals with these issues. He asks: ‘How are the different demands and forms of struggle to be harmonized, even if only within the limits of one city?’
He answers: ‘History has already answered this question: through Soviets.
‘These will unite the representatives of all the fighting groups. For this purpose, no one has yet proposed a different form of organisation; indeed, it would hardly be possible to think up a better one.
‘Soviets are not limited to an a priori party programme. They throw open their doors to all the exploited. Through these doors pass representatives of all strata, drawn into the general current of the struggle.
‘The organisation, broadening out together with the movement, is renewed again and again in its womb.
‘All political currents of the proletariat can struggle for leadership of the soviets on the basis of the widest democracy.
‘The slogan of soviets, therefore, crowns the programme of transitional demands.’
• continued tomorrow
