On the eve of its annual conference the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has produced damning evidence that explodes the lies that the savage cuts inflicted on the NHS by the Tory-LibDem coalition will not affect frontline services.
Their survey of 21 NHS Trusts in England found that 54 per cent of the jobs already earmarked for cuts are frontline clinical posts, with 46 per cent being nurses and healthcare assistants.
Under the cuts already imposed on Primary Care Trusts the RCN has established that 40,000 jobs across 30 NHS organisations will face the axe in the next three years.
Across the country patients are being denied treatment for a whole number of conditions that have been deemed as non-essential.
These so-called ‘non-essential’ treatments include surgery to remove cataracts, hip or joint replacement, cuts in mental health treatment centres and care homes for dementia sufferers through to maternity and physiotherapy services.
And this, according to Dr Peter Carter, RCN general secretary, is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. He went on to say that he had never known a time when so many nurses were talking about strike action in defence of the NHS.
All these cuts are taking place before the government’s Health and Social Care Bill – which opens up the NHS to privatisation and which insists on NHS hospitals being forced to compete with the private sector – is passed into law.
The effects of this bill will dwarf the cuts already made to jobs and services.
It will inevitably lead to the mass closure of wards and entire hospitals, and transform the NHS from being a health service free at the point of delivery, paid for out of general taxation, into a private health system where if you don’t have money or private insurance you can die in the gutter for all the government cares.
The knowledge that this is the future a bankrupt British capitalist system holds for the NHS is driving nurses and doctors to the inescapable conclusion that action is required to defend the most precious gain of the Welfare State.
The RCN and the BMA can hardly be described as the most militant organisations, so when their members start demanding strike action it is clear that a distinct and profound stage in the struggle to defend the Welfare State has been reached.
The Tory health secretary, Andrew Lansley, and David Cameron have made it quite clear that cuts and privatisation are inevitable as far as they are concerned.
The bankers and financial services who are responsible for the economic crisis that is gripping capitalism are demanding that the working and middle classes pay by having their services smashed, their pay cut and unemployment let rip.
Any call for industrial action in defence of the NHS, therefore, must of necessity be a call for a political strike to bring down the government.
Bankrupt capitalism demands nothing less than clawing back every gain made by the working class in over two hundred years of struggle if it is to prop up the banks and collapsing industries – and it will not be diverted from this path.
The scene is set for an all out confrontation between the working class and its allies in the middle class and this coalition government.
Those trade union leaders who try to avoid this confrontation and restrict the mass movement to pure protest must be removed and replaced by a new leadership prepared to organise the General Strike to bring down this government and replace it with a workers government committed to not just retaining the NHS, but expanding it at the expense of the bankers and capitalism by going forward to socialism.
