DR MARK Porter, Chair of the British Medical Association Council, opened their annual representatives meeting with a speech that tore into the policies of the Tory-led coalition.
Dr Porter began with a rhetorical question: ‘Do we have a government that really gets the NHS?’, before going on to outline exactly what the government has done to the health service.
Speaking with all the authority and knowledge of the medical profession which has had to bear the brunt of savage cuts, privatisation and attacks on doctors and other health workers from a government determined to destroy the NHS, Dr Porter roundly condemned the lying promise given by the Tories at the last general election that there would be no more ‘top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care.’
A broken promise that he points out has ‘cost at least £1.6 billion, possibly much more, to implement. One that continues to consume the energies of thousands of NHS staff who never even wanted it, just to stop it unravelling.’
Dr Porter was quite clear about who has benefited from all the cuts imposed by reorganisations and the introduction last year of the Health and Social Care Act saying: ‘It’s been a bumper year for the multinationals. For their armies of lawyers and accountants who find the curative so lucrative.’
Dr Porter cited the case of Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes NHS Trust which is being subjected to a ‘review’ by the management consultants McKinsey costing more than £3 million and which involved writing to 500 health providers around the world: ‘They wrote to the usual suspects, of course, the healthcare conglomerates. But they also asked small hospital groups in the mid-west of America who may not have even heard of Bedford, Massachusetts, never mind Bedford, England.’
They even wrote to an American provider offering ‘faith-based’ healthcare.
As Porter explained the real ‘waste’ in the NHS are: ‘The PFI deals signed off and egged on by the Treasury. The billions spent on fragmenting care by forcing the NHS to open up to private bidders. The droves of management consultants with their pointless flipcharts.’
His speech was most certainly a passionate and eloquent denunciation of the attacks started by the Labour government and now by the coalition on the NHS, attacks that Porter and the BMA clearly recognise threaten the complete destruction of the free health service.
Where he is badly mistaken, however, is his belief that these attacks are motivated purely by a misguided ideology and that government can be persuaded to change course.
He ended his speech with an appeal: ‘I’m not expecting four years’ damage to be cleared up in the ten months before the general election. But it’s not too late to start.’
It is too late for capitalism – what is driving the coalition is not ideology but the huge world economic crisis. A crisis that demands that all public expenditure on the welfare state, including the NHS be ended.
In its crisis capitalism can no longer afford the reforms won by the working class after the Second World War. Every penny spent on the NHS for the capitalist class is a waste, money that should be spent paying off the trillions of pounds of debt run up by the banking collapse, money that should be directed into the pockets of the multi-national privateers and not wasted on health and social benefits.
The NHS as part of the welfare state was not given to workers by a benevolent capitalist system, it was wrested from them by a determined struggle and it can only be preserved as long as people are determined to fight for it.
Not through appeals to the government or a wait for the next general election but an immediate fight to demand that the TUC call an all-out general strike to bring this government down and replace it with a workers government that will go forward to a socialist society.
That is the only way to defend the NHS.
