TODAY junior doctors launch four days of strike action throughout the NHS in England over the demand for a 35% pay increase to make up for the 26.2% cut in real terms pay that they have suffered under Tory wage freezes stretching back 14 years.
Hospital consultants will be taking a further two days of strike action on 24 and 25 August.
On Monday, the British Medical Association (BMA) revealed it had written to Tory Health Secretary Steve Barclay telling him that on top of this strike, consultants would be holding additional strikes on 19 and 20 September unless the government agreed to further negotiations.
The Tories have made it quite clear there will be no negotiations with the BMA over pay for junior doctors, consultants or any NHS workers.
As the chair of the BMA consultants committee, Dr Vishal Sharma, said on Monday, the fact that Barclay hasn’t bothered to meet with the BMA for 133 days demonstrates the Tories’ complete disregard for the ‘very future of the health service and its patients.’
All calls for the Tories to return to the negotiating table are being blanked completely by a government that has set on a course of realising a long-held plan to smash the NHS and replace it with a completely privatised health service.
This rush to privatisation saw the Tories revealing plans for the expansion of private companies to operate community diagnostic services, while private companies are being asked to identify all spare capacity in the private sector that NHS patients can be transferred to.
The response of the Labour Party was to attack this scheme and the Tories for delaying privatisation and not going far enough in opening up the NHS to the privateers.
The Tories were quick to blame strikes by junior doctors and consultants for ‘hindering efforts to cut NHS waiting lists and impacting on patient care’ while ignoring the basic fact that all the decades of deliberate underfunding by the Tories and the Labour government under Tony Blair has brought the NHS to its knees.
Huge cuts to real wages has forced thousands of doctors and nurses to leave the medical profession, while savage budget cuts have resulted in ‘crumbling hospitals’.
This week, data revealed that the situation is so chronic that over 100 chemical and toxic waste leaks were recorded in NHS hospitals in the last year, with health chiefs warning that NHS hospitals are ‘in a very bad way and getting worse’ and that the cost of fixing ‘crumbling’ NHS hospitals will be over £10 billion.
The Tories are insisting that the demand for a 35% pay increase is unaffordable, a position endorsed by Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, as they drive to cut the public debt by attacking public sector wages and spending on health and welfare.
£10 billion for the hospitals they have left to collapse into dangerous decay is clearly unaffordable for bankrupt British capitalism diving over the edge of recession and economic collapse.
The Tory plan for the NHS to declare it a ‘failing service’ that must be privatised out of existence, was spelt out by Leon Emirali, a former top advisor to health secretary Barclay, who, interviewed on Talk TV on Wednesday, bluntly stated the answer to ‘fixing’ the NHS is ‘full privatisation’ and that ‘we have to start from scratch, rip the thing up and start again. The NHS is broken on all fronts.’
The powerful working class will not allow this collapsing Tory government, with the support of Labour Party turncoats,n to destroy the NHS and return workers to the conditions of having to pay for private medicine that existed before a free at the point of delivery health service was established.
The TUC is holding its annual Congress in Liverpool from Sunday 10th September.
Join the lobby of Congress called by the WRP on Monday 11th September to demand that the TUC calls out the entire trade union movement in a general strike to defend the NHS and bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and a socialist planned economy that will guarantee a fully-funded healthcare system for all.
This is the only way to defend the NHS.
