NOT content with wrecking Iraq, the US administration is moving in to wreck the British NHS on behalf of the US drug companies.
The US deputy health secretary Azar was in town on Sunday to continue his discussions with Health Secretary Hewitt – who is on record as saying that there are no limits to NHS privatisation – on behalf of the giant US drug companies.
Azar, under the impression that the UK is already the 51st state of the union, is urging Hewitt that the National Institute for Clinical Excellence be abolished and replaced by a US drug friendly agency that would allow them open house entry into Britain to flood the NHS with US drugs.
The US is now treating the UK as one of its banana republics with its demand that the biggest drug companies in the world be allowed unrestricted access to the NHS as part of the Blairite free market reforms that are privatising the service.
Hewitt is already close to the US government’s position with her policy to privatise the NHS commissioning bodies.
Azar also demanded that a US-style medical insurance should be introduced so that the better off would be able to pay for more expensive treatment than the state is prepared to offer.
Azar confided to the Guardian newspaper that he’d had ‘some great discussions’ with Health Minister Hewitt in the US, and that he had followed them up with discussions with the Health Secretary’s officials and also with Treasury officials.
These revelations must serve to put a column of steel into the resistance to the Labour government’s programme to reconfigure over a hundred NHS hospitals.
Blair’s recent declaration that the next three months will be a ‘crunch-time’ for the NHS reforms (privatisation) was the signal for the US administration to weigh in with the demand that its drug companies be allowed to take over the ‘NHS market’.
While the above diabolical discussions, complete with US intervention to drive forward the privatisation of the NHS, have been taking place, the NHS trade union leaders have been doing nothing except plead with the Blair government to slow down the process, right at the time when privatisation is being speeded up many times over.
However, throughout the entire country tens of thousands of workers and middle class people have been marching and demonstrating to defend the NHS from mass cuts, closures and privatisation.
This struggle has now got to be stepped up to match the US-Blair offensive, with all those millions who want to defend the NHS taking decisive action to defeat this privatising government.
In every city and town councils of action must be formed, made up of the local trade unions and all community and youth organisations, to occupy the hospitals threatened with cuts, and to assist the staff in physically preventing the closure of wards, A&E and maternity departments, and whole hospitals where they have been targeted by the government.
Such councils of action must not only organise occupations and mass demonstrations in defence of the NHS they will organise inside the trade unions to force the leaders to call strike actions to defend the NHS, and to force the resignations of leaders who won’t.
The objective must be to organise mass strike actions of all the TUC trade unions and to force the union leaders to organise a general strike to bring down the Blair government to go forward to a workers’ government.
This will resolve the NHS debt crisis by nationalising the banks and all of the drug companies and restoring the NHS as the service that provides the necessary treatment for all patients, free at the point of need.
This is the action that is required. What is vitally necessary is to build the leadership that will fight for it and lead it.
Only the WRP is building the kind of revolutionary leadership that is necessary to successfully defend the NHS by going from councils of action to a general strike and a socialist revolution. Workers and youth should join the WRP today.
