THE Prime Minister Gordon Brown has spelt out that his answer to the deepening crisis of capitalism is to attempt to rescue the bosses and the bankers and to place the entire burden of the crisis onto the backs of the working class and the middle class.
On the question of the NHS he has agreed to destroy the entire network of district general hospitals and instead bring in 150 private hospitals, including polyclinics, into the NHS to consume the NHS budget.
The mass closure of District General Hospitals will mean that thousands of consultants, junior doctors and nurses will be made redundant.
The 30,000 junior doctors that will be competing in 2008 for 10,000 jobs is just the start.
In the new NHS it is to be the patients’ responsibility to prevent themselves becoming ill, and if they do not exercise that responsibility, after being scanned in a private centre, they will not be treated by the NHS, and will have to either go without treatment, or pay for it.
Treatment is to be at home. There, the patient, now called an ‘expert patient’ by Brown, will be treating himself and checking out his condition with a doctor at the end of a phone line.
Brown in his recent speech said that within two years he expected to see 100,000 so-called expert patients treating themselves at home, and that the number of expert patients treating themselves would be rapidly built up to 15 million.
District General Hospitals are to be made redundant.
The sole reason for this onslaught is to slash the health budget by tens of billions so as to be able to bail out the bankers and purchase WMDs for the military.
It is a matter of record that the health trade union leaders have not called one occupation to stop the closure of a hospital, or one industrial action to defend the NHS against this attempt to demolish it.
The story is no different on the question of the defence of the pensions, wages, jobs and conditions of service of the entire working class.
In the recent BAA dispute over its decision to end final salary pensions, workers voted by a massive majority to take strike actions to defend their pensions and to force BAA to withdraw their plans.
The TGWU leaders made the point that they were opposed to the imposition of the decision without them being consulted and as soon as BAA decided that it would consult the union leaders, they called off the strikes.
The union leaders are solely concerned with the preservation of their role as ‘intermediaries’. They were not prepared to lead the strike actions to force BAA to withdraw their plan to get rid of the final salary pension scheme.
So the bosses live to fight another day, after consultation, when they have built up a strike-breaking apparatus, and are ready to impose their plan.
As far as the strike actions of the Virgin Airways cabin crews were concerned, the Amicus trade union leaders just called off the action on the eve of the strikes because they were not prepared to fight for their members.
Currently, the CWU leaders have opened up the fight to defend their members’ final salary pension by saying that they agree that the current final salary pension should be replaced, which is exactly what Royal Mail want.
Now, spurred on by the capitalist crisis, Premier Brown has decided that he is going to bring in three-year wage deals, which in a period of rocketing inflation will be the most savage wage cuts ever seen. Brown is determined to bail out the bankers by crucifying the workers.
Most trade union leaders are declaring that they see nothing wrong in three year deals as long as they are fair! This is like giving Sweeney Todd a chance to show what a good barber he is!
The reformist trade union leaders cannot defend the working class, they can only betray. There must be a new revolutionary leadership built in the trade unions that will take action to bring down Brown to go forward to socialism.
