HEALTH Secretary Hewitt, who not so long ago said that there would be no limits to privatisation in the NHS, yesterday revealed that she was demanding that the NHS trusts make a £250 million ‘profit’ for the financial year 2007-2008.
She has already stated that the NHS would be breaking even this financial year, when most experts are predicting that there will be at least a £100 million deficit, and when 100 NHS trusts in England are expected to be £1.6 billion in deficit.
The service ended the last financial year £512 million in deficit, but Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has pledged to balance the books this year.
Hewitt said many hospitals could address their deficits by increasing the number of operations they carried out on a day-case basis, saving beds and sometimes requiring fewer staff.
‘If every hospital was doing as well as the top 25 per cent, over day-case surgery and length of stay, the NHS would realise over £2 billion to invest in other services and new drugs.’
Hewitt responded to claims that one dozen NHS trusts are bankrupt by saying that those trusts would be audited on a monthly basis, and expected to balance the books month by month.
The new Hewitt push for a 250 million NHS surplus means that the 100 trusts that she states owe £1.6 billion are in for a very severe mauling and that they will see not only their A&Es and maternity facilities closed, but entire hospitals along with them will face the bulldozer.
Nobody can say that Blair has not been true to his word about the NHS. These words were that this year would see either a major breakthrough for his NHS privatising reforms, or see his government brought down.
Throughout the whole of this year the pace of NHS privatisation has been speeded up to the point where between 60-70 major general hospitals face closure.
The trade union leaders have no answer to this critical situation, except to prostrate themselves more and more in front of the government and its privatisation drive.
The working class however has nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide.
The crisis demands action and the working class will respond to the party that organises that action.
Quite simply, the trade unions in the localities, all of them, both NHS and non NHS, must get together with the local communities and form councils of action that will prevent the government and its managers from closing wards and closing hospitals by occupying hospitals that are under threat.
If the state tries to break such occupations then the working class must further use its power. The transport industries and the factories must take strike action, and picket lines of thousands must surround the hospitals.
In this way the working class will make clear that it is ready, willing and able to defend the NHS and defeat the Labour government that is seeking to privatise it.
In fact, occupations and mass actions to defend the hospitals will clear the way for a new leadership to advance inside the trade unions and rapidly create the conditions where the trade unions are mobilised in national and general strike action to bring the Blair-Brown government down in order to go forward to a workers’ government.
This will nationalise the banks and the drugs industry to generate all of the required funds for maintaining and developing the NHS.
This is the way forward for the working class and the majority of the middle class. If capitalism cannot afford an NHS, decent pensions, council housing, decent jobs and a future for youth, then capitalism must go and be replaced by a higher form of society based on a nationalised and planned economy producing to satisfy people’s needs, under socialism.
Only the WRP is fighting for the programme of action to defend the NHS and prepare the way for a socialist transformation in Britain.
Make sure that you join the WRP today.
