On Sunday, the Guardian newspaper published part of the results from its months-long investigation into the effects of poverty on the NHS.
Included in the disclosures reported are warnings from NHS experts that Britain’s ‘medieval’ levels of health inequality are having a ‘devastating’ effect on the NHS.
Increasing rates of child poverty have had a massive impact on hospitals, with the health service estimated to be spending up to £50 billion a year on the effects of poverty. One senior NHS figure quoted in the Guardian said they are seeing ‘medieval’ levels of untreated illness in the poorest communities in the UK.
Another told the paper that hospitals are seeing a ‘chilling’ trend in vulnerable people, both young and old, deliberately self-harming, desperate to secure a hospital bed. They reported increasing rates in what is described as ‘Dickensian’ illnesses including scabies, rickets and scarlet fever.
Illnesses that have long been associated with the huge poverty conditions experienced by workers and their families in the 19th century are now fast becoming commonplace in 21st century Britain!
The last comprehensive report on the effect of poverty and NHS spending was published in 2016 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).
At the time it was estimated that poverty was a prime factor in £29 billion of NHS spending.
Professor Donald Hirsch, one of the authors of the earlier report, told the Guardian that while the exact cost today cannot be known, ‘We spend a lot more on the NHS now than in 2014, and if the fraction attributable to poverty were the same, then the cost would have risen to nearly £50 billion.’ He added: ‘In fact, it could be much higher, since far more people are experiencing severe hardship, including hunger and destitution, which could have strengthened the links between poverty and ill health, and hence higher health spending.’
Starmer’s Labour government has carried on – and in fact accelerated – the previous Tory austerity onslaught on workers with its attack on the disabled benefits and determination to keep the two child benefit cap.
Starmer was forced to make partial concessions on personal independence payments (PIP) in the face of a massive revolt by Labour MPs, but a large number of MPs are still threatening to vote against the cuts in today’s vote on Labour’s Welfare Reforms Bill.
Even this watered down bill will, according to the Labour government’s own impact assessment, push an extra 150,000 disabled people into poverty.
The NHS was established exactly 77 years ago, in July 1948, as a free at the point of use health service.
The NHS was created in the face of massive opposition from the capitalist class by a powerful working class determined never to return to the days of the 19th century when poverty consigned men, women and children amongst impoverished workers to an early death from diseases and with no ability to access private health.
Today, both the previous Tory government and now the weak divided Labour government under Keir Starmer are attempting to turn the clock back to Dickensian times through savage austerity cuts to benefits and the health service.
Starmer’s government is driven by the requirements of a British capitalist system that is collapsing under the weight of a massive national debt – currently around £2.9 trillion.
Yesterday, the Bank for International Settlements (the central bank for central banks) issued a thinly veiled warning to Starmer that the partial retreat on welfare cuts, designed to cut £5 billion of the debt, would pile further pressures on bankrupt British capitalism, warning: ‘High levels of public debt are a significant vulnerability that governments can no longer ignore.’
The BIS is telling Starmer that there must be no concessions and this Labour government must get on with the job of driving the working class back to conditions of the 19th century to rescue a bankrupt British capitalist system from complete economic collapse by smashing the NHS and destroying all the gains of the welfare state.
The working class must now use its power by forcing the TUC to immediately call a general strike to kick out the Labour government and bring in a workers government and socialism.
This is the way forward.
