NEXT Tuesday the doctors’ trade union, the BMA, meets in London for an extraordinary Special Representative Meeting (SRM).
350 representatives of its 140,000 members, consultants, GPs and junior doctors, will consider an agenda of 500 or so motions on the coalition’s Health and Social Care Bill – the vehicle for the Tory-LibDem attempt to smash the NHS and privatise the health system.
In the words of one senior doctor last week, it is a Bill designed to drive health care back to the days of the 1930s, the days of private medicine for the wealthy, with the rest of us left reliant on charity and an early death to look forward to.
The overwhelming majority of motions to the SRM oppose the Bill and are critical of the position adopted by the leadership of the BMA from the outset.
This has been one of ‘critical engagement’ with a government hell bent on destroying the greatest gain of the welfare state. Resolutions on the agenda demand that this critical engagement is ended!
The BMA top leaders have desperately tried to present the Bill as being ‘good in parts’ while carefully ignoring the fact that its sole intention is to rip open the NHS to the jackals of the private health companies, close down hospitals and use the cuts to fund the bankrupt banking system.
Whilst the leadership of the BMA might have been comfortable with critically engaging, the South West Region motion describes this policy as a failure and calls for the BMA to oppose the Bill ‘in its entirety’.
The powerful London Region is calling in its motion for a vote of no confidence in the Tory health minister, Andrew Lansley, and calls for the BMA to poll its members on ‘forms of action to prevent the implementation of the legislation’ – a clear call for industrial action by doctors to defend the existence of the NHS and to take on the government.
The leadership of the BMA have reacted, to this unprecedented demand from doctors that they defend the NHS, in a predictably dismissive way.
Dr Steve Hajioff, the Chair of the BMA Representative body, loftily informed the world that even if the delegates to the SRM voted to take strike action, it would only be a recommendation to be passed on to the BMA ruling council – it is they who would decide if a ballot of members for action would take place.
He went on to make it clear that as far as the council is concerned any action would be a political strike against a government and therefore unlawful under anti-union legislation, and as such would be rejected by the council.
This is the line spouted by every trade union bureaucrat desperate to tie their members up with the chains of the law, to prevent any real fight to stop the working class from paying the full price of capitalism’s collapse, including seeing the NHS privatised.
Doctors, along with every trade union member, are rejecting this treachery by their leadership.
The SRM on March 15 must pass the motions calling for industrial action to defeat this Bill and the government that is forcing it through, and for ending any engagement, critical or otherwise, with it.
Crucially, the BMA doctors must not be left to defend the NHS on their own.
The SRM must take a special decision that its members participate in a massive way in the national TUC march on March 26, just eleven days later.
The BMA must get out a special leaflet for the demo explaining its position of rejecting the Bill and the privatisation of the NHS, and calling for every section of the trade union movement to take action alongside it to defeat the Bill and defend the NHS.
This will mean action to bring down the coalition government to bring in a workers government that will defend the NHS and develop it as a free service to satisfy people’s health needs.