UNISON accused the government yesterday of a ‘fundamental breach of trust’.
This was after the Department of Health placed an advertisement in the official EU journal inviting the major international health insurers to bid to take over the management of NHS Primary Care Trusts, with a health care purchasing budget of £64 billion.
UNISON pulled no punches with its description of this invitation as ‘a contract to privatise the whole of primary care across the UK’.
It added: ‘This is such a fundamental breach of trust that we are asking the TUC to get together a meeting of all health unions to thrash out a strategy.’ The statement continued to condemn ‘a fundamental change in Labour Party policy’ that could mean ‘the jobs of health visitors, community midwives, occupational therapists and district nurses are under threat or may be transferred to the private sector.’
Ex-Labour health secretary Frank Dobson commented: ‘If this is not the privatisation of the NHS, then I don’t know what is.’
The government has definitely thrown down the gauntlet, but not just to the NHS trade unions.
They have launched a major attack on the whole of the working class and the middle class who depend on the NHS to safeguard their health and the health of their families.
Therefore the TUC must call a much wider meeting than that of the leaders of the NHS trade unions.
It must call a meeting of the leaders of all of its affiliated trade unions, and also invite the powerful non-TUC NHS trade unions, the RCN and the BMA, plus the other NHS professional organisations to attend.
This meeting must then take on itself the responsibility of defending the NHS, the jewel in the crown of the Welfare State, which was brought into existence in 1948 by the generations who returned from the Second World War determined to build a better world, and that nobody should have to go through a time like the ‘hungry thirties’ ever again.
What they won for us we cannot give up.
The only strategic response to Blair’s treacherous threat to destroy the NHS and the Welfare State is to move to bring down the government that is making this threat, in order to go forward to a workers’ government that will bring in socialism and put an end to capitalism and its law of the jungle.
The TUC must be made to bring all unions and all NHS professional bodies together in order to take such decisive action.
The first step must be to call a one day general strike of all workers, while providing emergency cover in the NHS and fire services. This will show the power of the movement and deliver an ultimatum to the government to end the privatisation of the NHS and to exclude all the private health providers. The government should be given a month to do this.
Since the government is determinedly Thatcherite the prospect is that it will ignore such a demand and carry on with its privatisations, and even speed them up.
When it does this, and ignores the time that it has been given, an indefinite general strike must be called to bring it down, and advance to a workers’ government.
This means that instead of the drug companies and the insurance companies being brought into the centre of the NHS to devour the NHS budget, they will be nationalised under workers’ control along with the banks to provide the cash to expand and further develop the NHS.
There is not a moment to lose!
The TUC must call a general strike!
Bring down the Blair government!
Forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
