YESTERDAY, the Guardian newspaper revealed that 100,000 jobs in the NHS could be wiped out because of the brutal cost-cutting regime imposed by Labour health secretary Wes Streeting.
Last month, Labour prime minister Keir Starmer announced the abolition of NHS England by merging it with the Department of Health under plans to ‘save’ up to £800 million by making about half of the 15,300 staff at NHS England redundant along with 3,300 staff at the Department of Health.
These numbers now turn out to wildly underestimate the actual scale of the massive job losses the Labour government is inflicting on the NHS in order to cut spending on the public health service.
While claiming that this is purely an ‘efficiency’ plan to rid the NHS of duplicated jobs, the real intention is to achieve the complete break-up of the NHS into 42 autonomous ‘Integrated Care Boards’ (ICBs) each independently commissioning services.
The entire break-up of the NHS and the drive to privatise it out of existence is to be accompanied by the wholesale destruction of jobs that Streeting and Starmer claim are an unnecessary drain on the government finances.
According to the Guardian these job losses are so large that NHS leaders have urged the Treasury to cover the costs involved, which they say could top £2 billion. £2 billion that Trusts haven’t got.
Sir Jim Mackey, recently appointed by Streeting as NHS England’s chief executive to lead the jobs massacre, has told the 215 trusts to cut costs in functions deemed wasteful by 50% by the end of the year.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, told the Guardian that the scale of cuts demanded by Labour could lead to job losses across the 215 trusts ranging from 41,100 to 150,700 and that trusts were being asked to make such ‘staggering’ savings that they might not be able to help bring down waiting times and delays in patient treatment.
Trusts would simply be unable to afford the huge redundancy payments to staff laid off, and Taylor called on the government to create an NHS ‘national redundancy fund to cover these job losses’ adding, ‘any savings the government hopes to make risks being eroded at best and completely wiped out at worst.’
For Starmer and Streeting, the wiping out of any ‘savings’ from a jobs massacre will provide the justification for the wholesale privatisation of the NHS on the grounds that it has become unaffordable for a British capitalist system strangled by debt-fuelled recession.
This crisis has been massively deepened by the global trade war launched by US president Donald Trump’s administration.
With the world stock markets continuing to crash this week and even Larry Fink, head of BlackRock the world’s largest investment money manager, admitting on Monday that ‘we are probably in recession right now’ these job losses and Labour’s privatisation plan for the NHS will be vastly accelerated to the point of destruction of the NHS, along with every public service.
Starmer is desperate to try to win economic crumbs from Trump and is quite prepared to submit to Trump’s long proclaimed demands for the NHS to be thrown open to US private health companies and American pharmaceutical giants.
Trump has already signalled that there is no room for trade negotiations, only abject surrender by the UK and the rest of the world, as American capitalism attempts to survive recession and depression by dumping its crisis on the working class at home and abroad.
Workers must take action to defend the NHS and all the gains of the past by sacking the TUC leaders who refuse to fight this reactionary Labour government, replacing them with a leadership prepared to mobilise the full strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down Starmer’s government and bring in a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy.
This is the way forward for the working class of the world – to build up the WRP and Young Socialists in Britain and build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to organise and carry out the overthrow of capitalism with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
