THE battle has now been joined to defend the NHS, which the Tory government is determined to destroy, to return the UK to the barbarism of health care being available, only if you can pay for it!
Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph labelled the NHS as ‘Labour’s Original Sin’, stating that ‘The root cause of its ills is that it is a nationalised system funded almost entirely out of taxation’.
The ruling class is desperate to smash the NHS so that its budget can be used to try and prevent a collapse of the UK capitalist order, that is now facing its greatest crisis ever.
On the same centre pages, one Douglas Murray lashes the USA for dooming capitalist Britain by refusing to grant it a trade deal.
After Brexit, the biggest prize was a trade deal with the USA, but this was denied the UK ruling class.
Murray states that he introduced the top US negotiators to their UK counterparts and looked forward to a ‘full and generous deal being brought about.’
But the Trump regime failed. Murray states: ‘The moment that the Biden administration came in, it immediately became clear that a very different set of priorities was on the table. Despite the work already done, the trade deal was put aside.’
In fact: ‘At the very top of the Democratic Party there appeared to be an animus against this country.’
The British ruling class came unstuck and now the UK working class has to pay the bill, with job cuts, wage cuts and the destruction of the NHS, and a return to the conditions of the 1930’s. Not on your life!
The UK working class will not have it and it will smash and overthrow the UK ruling class and establish a workers state, and planned production to satisfy people’s needs to prevent it.
NHS workers and the NHS trade unions are defending the entire UK working class when they defend the NHS, whose existence has made life tolerable for millions of workers and youth.
Tal Ellenbogen of the BMA Junior Doctors Committee, speaking on the picket line at Nottingham Hospital, said yesterday: ‘For patients and staff on any day of the year of the 2023 version of the NHS is that there are not enough doctors around.
‘We see our colleagues leaving left, right and centre due to 15 years of pay cuts and that means that we are covering more patients than we should, sometimes as many as 150 patients on a night shift.
‘But more importantly for patients, it means they are waiting around longer, staying in trolleys in A&Es. They are not getting the care that they deserve because there aren’t enough doctors around.
‘So we are out here today to keep sending that message to the government. We want the government to restore our pay. Just get back to where we were in 2008, a time when the waiting list was only 2.3 million, not 7.2 million, which was what it was before we started striking.
‘What we want from the government is to restore our pay, work with us, work for a better NHS, a more well-staffed NHS, an NHS where patients wait a week or two to see a consultant, not months and years, an NHS where we don’t see patients on trolleys but we see them in cubicles with dignity, an NHS where patients aren’t stuck in an ambulance for 10 hours.’
There is only one way that this can be done and it is not by going back to private medical care for profit. The health workers battle is a fight for the working class as a whole.
There can be no return to private medical care. This means that the full strength of the working class must be used to win this struggle.
The TUC must be made to call a general strike to save the NHS, by bringing down the Tories and going forward to a Workers Government and Socialism.
We need a Workers Government, based on Councils of Action that will nationalise the banks and the major industries and put them under workers’ management to bring in a planned socialist economy where production is to satisfy people’s needs not create a handful of billionaires.
Only the WRP and the Young Socialists fight for this socialist perspective in the UK as a vital part of the world wide socialist revolution, to replace the anarchy of capitalist production with planned production to satisfy people’s needs. Bring down the Tories with a general strike! Forward with the socialist revolution!
