HEALTH Secretary Andrew Lansley has been demoted to the role of Leader of the House of Commons.
This is after his health goose was cooked by the massive hostility of the working class and the middle class, led by the BMA doctors, to his health privatisation measure, the Health and Social Care Bill, which is now an Act.
The working class and the doctors fought him every inch of the way, but were let down by the TUC leaders and the BMA top leadership, who refused to call a general strike action to stop the Bill becoming an Act, saying in unison ‘we are not revolutionaries’.
Leaders of Unison and the BMA have now gone further and given up taking any action over the pension cuts whatsoever.
Nevertheless, health workers, doctors and patients are in the mood to fight the consequences of the Act as the privatisation measures, the cuts and the hospital closures emerge.
In fact, bigger battles are ahead against the consequences of the implementation of the Act than at any stage of the passage of the Bill into law.
This is why Lansley has been dumped as damaged goods and been replaced by Murdoch’s favourite Tory, Jeremy Hunt, the man who made a habit of bending over backwards to help the Murdoch empire acquire BSkyB and was only foiled when the stink from the business became too great for the public to bear.
He is now in charge of health and has no doubt given the same assurances to the international health privateers as he did to the Murdoch empire.
His appointment means that workers, doctors and youth must form councils of action in every area of the country to occupy hospitals to stop them being closed or cut to ribbons, or privatised, and to organise mass strike actions leading to a general strike to bring the coaliton down – the only way to defend the NHS.
In their other moves Cameron-Osborne have left Kenneth Clarke in the cabinet, since his period as a minister under Thatcher, during the miners strike, will no doubt come in handy in the future. As a gesture to the Tory right wing, he has been replaced as Justice Minister by the cruder right winger, Chris Grayling, who can be guaranteed to lock people up and throw away the key.
At the heart of darkness in the Tory Party will remain the reactionary duo of Iain Duncan Smith, the tormenter of the poor, the disabled and those on housing benefit, and Education Secretary Michael Gove, the crusader for spending hundreds of millions on Free Schools so that sections of the rich, who consider private school fees to be rather too high, can send their children to these private schools under another name, but at the expense of the state.
Downing Street said yesterday the Prime Minister wants these ‘strong reformers’ to continue their work – destroying free state education and the Welfare State.
The Prime Minister is also said to want to bring back Liberal Democrat and right winger David Laws, who resigned two years ago as chief secretary to the Treasury after admitting he claimed expenses to pay his partner’s rent.
Conservative Party co-chair Baroness Warsi, who boasted that she was able to appeal to migrants, women and the common man because of her working class background, and that she should keep her job because of this, has been shown the door for her presumptuous questioning of the place of the Tory elite.
The Cameron-Osborne changes are minor and have been forced on them by the depth of the crisis, although in no way do they match its requirements.
The task for the working class remains to bring this government down with a general strike to bring in a workers government and socialism. Only the WRP fights for this policy – join it today to secure the future with a socialist revolution.
