THE UNITE trade union kicked off a campaign yesterday morning to call on Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak and chancellor Jeremy Hunt to ‘use this week’s budget to avert the funding crisis engulfing the NHS.’
The campaign consists of a van covered in slogans ‘telling the PM it’s his last chance to save the NHS’ which started a tour of Westminster yesterday finishing on Thursday, the day Hunt is due to deliver his Autumn budget.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: ‘Services are at breaking point while workers are struggling to make ends meet. The blame for this lies squarely with the government. That’s why Unite’s ad campaign is a warning to the PM that it’s his last chance to save the NHS.’
Graham is delusional if she seriously believes the Tories are at all interested in saving the NHS.
On Thursday Hunt will reveal precisely how the Tories plan to ‘restore order’ to public services through ‘eye-watering cuts’ – that early estimates put at £35 billion – to fill a black hole of over £50 billion in public finances.
The remaining £25 billion will come from stealth tax increases that will hit the poorest-paid the hardest, as the level at which income tax is liable will be held at the present level instead of increasing in line with inflation, meaning hundreds of thousands on benefits, or pensioners, will become liable for paying income tax – many for the first time.
The NHS will be in the front line as the Tories have demanded ‘savings’ through increased efficiency and made it clear there will be no pay increase for nurses and other NHS workers.
Over 12 years of Tory austerity attacks, that have seen nurses’ pay drastically cut forcing thousands to leave as shortages and low wages take their massive toll, have brought the NHS to its knees, and no amount of appeals to Sunak to ‘save the NHS’ or ad campaigns are going to change this.
Sunak and the Tories answer only to the international capitalist money markets, not to the working or middle classes, who are having the entire cost of the capitalist crisis dumped on their backs.
When Hunt and Sunak talk about ‘restoring confidence’ in British capitalism, they are talking about faithfully carrying out the instructions of their real masters, the international money markets.
The Tories rely on these markets to buy up government bonds – in effect IOUs with the promise to pay back with staggering amounts of interest – and these markets pull the strings of Sunak and Hunt.
Liz Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng made the catastrophic error of believing a bankrupt British economy could take on billions more debt and the world financial markets and fund managers would sit back and let it happen.
Truss was quickly dumped and Sunak, the bankers’ man, installed to carry out their diktats of making the working class pay through super-austerity cuts to ‘settle the debts’.
What has worried the capitalist financiers is that the Truss debacle has revealed clearly to the working class exactly who is in charge.
Instead of being confined to the financial pages of the bourgeois press, the role of these parasites in dictating to the government that workers must be driven into poverty while all the gains of the past, including the NHS, be smashed, is clear for all to see.
As one investor at a major fund told the Guardian: ‘Normal people shouldn’t really ever hear about bond markets’ adding: ‘If fixed income ends up on the news, that’s a very bad sign indeed.’
A very bad sign for capitalism indeed, as the working class are now demanding an end to protest campaigns and for trade union leaders to take real action to defend their wages and the NHS by calling a general strike.
A general strike aims to bring down the Tories replacing them with a workers’ government that will nationalise the banks and major industries under the management of workers, going forward to a socialist planned economy.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists fight for this revolutionary perspective – come to the 53rd News Line Anniversary Rally on November 19 and join the WRP and YS today.
