The abolition of NHS England by merging it with the Department of Health, announced by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday, is the start of collapsing the whole NHS and handing it over to private health companies and venture capitalists.
Speaking in Hull about his plans to slash the size of the civil service to save up to £800 million, Starmer said abolishing NHS England would mean more money for ‘nurses, doctors, GP appointments’ without providing any evidence, apart from the nebulous sloganeering by himself and Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
The plans will see about 50 per cent of the 15,300 staff at NHS England, derided as the ‘King of Quangos’ by Starmer, and 3,300 staff at the Department of Health made redundant.
Streeting said the creation of the quango had been ‘disastrous’, with its headcount doubling since it was founded and its costs soaring to £2 billion a year.
Boosting draconian cuts, he continued that ‘money will flow down to the front line to cut waiting times faster and deliver our plan for change by slashing through the layers of red tape and ending the infantilisation of front-line NHS leaders,’ he claimed.
Nothing was said of the billions of pounds of military aid annually for the war in Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’, or the increased military spending of up to 2.5 per cent of GDP paid for by the working class.
Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA, civil servants’ union, itself being targeted for thousands of job cuts, has correctly condemned the so-called ‘reforms’.
He told Times Radio: ‘They’ve got to make some tough choices. And that’s why you can see when you kind of examine this point, are you cutting? Are you reforming? What is it?
‘And NHS England is the perfect example of that. And a cut is not reform.
‘If they’re going to cut staffing in half, the idea that you’re going to get away with that is just for the birds.’
He continued: ‘If you look at what he’s saying about the size of NHS England and the Department of Health, the idea that this is all duplication is just simply not there.
‘So Wes Streeting is going to have to work out what he is not going to do, because just now there’s work being done by those people, and if they’re not there, then it’s not going to get done, and so he has to make those choices,’ he added.
According to the Daily Telegraph, NHS sources said the move was a gamble that it would ‘cost more than it would save in the short-term’ without having any material impact on patients.
Alan Milburn, the former health secretary under Tony Blair’s New Labour, and leading promoter of NHS England’s downfall, is the lead non-executive on the Department of Health (DoH) and Streeting’s advisor.
A major NHS privatising figure of New Labour, he introduced far-reaching changes that made more use of the private sector, creating NHS Foundation Trusts (FT) in 2002, which meant more money and less regulation for the best-performing hospitals, while allowing the private sector to take over failing NHS hospitals.
Milburn said last year that Streeting was prepared to go ‘further and faster’ than he had.
The obscene spectacle we see today is Starmer’s reactionary Labour government privatising the NHS, founded in 1948 by Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan, after the horrors of World War II and destitute living conditions of the 1930s Great Depression. The NHS provides free healthcare at the point of treatment, funded by general taxation.
Now is the time when the NHS MUST BE DEFENDED. It is the most advanced social gain of the British working class. The working class must now demand that all its trade unions organise a general strike to defend and retain the NHS, by challenging, defeating and bringing down Streeting and his Labour government.
We need a general strike to bring down this Labour government and end its vicious anti-working class cuts that are destroying all the vital services that millions of workers and their families rely on.
Workers must rise up and defend the junior doctors, GPs, nurses and other NHS staff who are all fighting against Starmer’s super-austerity cuts, in one big mass movement, to kick out the Labour government and replace it with a workers government.
Such a government would immediately nationalise all basic industries, the banks and the land and provide the resources for a great NHS once again and a future for millions under a socialist planned economy.
Defend our NHS and stop it being privatised! Forward to a Socialist Britain to benefit all!