ON Monday, the Tory Health Minister, Andrew Lansley, was forced to declare a ‘pause’ in the coalition government’s drive to privatise and smash up the NHS.
Lansley made it quite clear in his speech that this ‘pause’ was not to stop this process, merely to take on board some minor amendments.
There is no ‘Plan B’ as far as the coalition is concerned.
Capitalism in its bankruptcy simply cannot afford to continue with a National Health Service, free at the point of delivery and funded out of general taxation.
It requires that the billions spent on the NHS be transferred to propping up the collapsed banking system and that the health service be once again opened up to the private sector so that they can enjoy the huge profits to be made out of a privatised health system.
What was made equally clear on Monday was that in this the Tories and Lib Dems have the complete support of the Labour Party leadership.
In a speech, Labour leader Ed Miliband went out of his way to reassure the Tory-led coalition that the Labour Party opposition would enter into the debate about the planned destruction of the NHS with an ‘open mind’ and assured them of his full support ‘if there is a genuine attempt to address weaknesses in the Tory reorganisation proposals.’
No call even for Lansley’s resignation, let alone the resignation of the entire government, over this vicious attack on what Labour always describe as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the Welfare State.
Instead, an offer to help them out of the problem they face.
This problem being that millions of workers have concluded that this government has to be removed.
The fact is that Miliband and the Labour leadership are 100% behind the privatisation of the NHS – after all, it was a process started by Blair and continued under the Brown government.
It was Blair who under the guise of ‘patient choice’ opened up the NHS to private foundation hospitals, while Brown enthusiastically pioneered the Private Finance Initiative, which saw hospitals built and run for vast profit by private contractors.
Miliband went out of the way to praise Blair and Brown’s policies while emphasising that he fully supported the principle of transferring power to GP commissioning consortiums, that is handing over £80 billion of NHS money to consortiums that will be swallowed up by the private health companies.
In principle there is not one iota of difference between Lansley and Miliband.
The creation of the NHS and the Welfare State after World War II represented the highest achievement of the working class, who returned from war determined to never return to pre-war starvation and unemployment.
It was won from a hostile capitalist class, who viewed the NHS as a temporary concession – while workers see it as a permanent right.
Today, when capitalism is in the midst of the greatest crisis in its history, with banks and entire nation states facing bankruptcy, these reforms must be destroyed as far as the ruling class is concerned.
The Labour Party, tied as it is to the maintenance of capitalism at all costs, is completely unable to defend the gains of the past.
Reformism cannot defeat these attacks on the NHS only the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can achieve this.
The political degeneration of the reformist Labour Party means that it now stands as a prop to this reactionary coalition and the bankrupt capitalist system it serves.
The only way to defend the NHS and the entire Welfare State is by mobilising the full strength of the working class in a general strike, which has as its aim bringing down this government and going forward to a workers government and socialism.
