LAST Wednesday, the trade unions with the support of the majority of the Labour Party constituency parties defeated the government on the vital issue of health privatisation at the Labour Party conference.
Outside the conference on that day there was a demonstration of striking NHS Logistic workers, whose company was due to be sold off on October 1 (yesterday) to the German parcel giant DHL, which is already threatening to sack 3,000 of its workers in this country to bring in contract labour.
The Labour government has ignored the resolution, as expected. The trade union leaders have dillied, dallied, equivocated, and then betrayed their members by refusing to act on the UNISON resolution that demanded no more privatisation, to let the first privatisation of a part of the NHS through.
Blair, Brown and Hewitt will no doubt be conferring over which parts of the NHS will be next for outright privatisation.
The working class will be looking at their leadership with hostility and anger. Union members won a victory over privatisation at the Labour Party conference on the Wednesday and then their leaders collapsed like a pack of cards.
Today, DHL is mocking the workers that it has just ‘acquired’ by holding celebration parties in the canteens of the five NHS Logistics distribution depots.
This has made the workforce even more furious at the way that they have been treated.
Leading shop stewards at the plants have told News Line that they will be pressing for a ballot for further strike action against their privatisation, and we give them our full support.
However, this time around the whole of the trade union movement must come out with them, and leaders who will not take such sympathy action must be made to quit and retired in disgrace.
That this battle cannot be postponed even for another day is made clear by the latest NHS developments.
The debacle that the Labour government is reducing the NHS to is revealed by the latest figures on Accident and Emergency Departments, and the spread of superbugs in NHS hospitals.
The new NHS chief executive has decreed that up to 60 hospitals face re-configuration in the period ahead. These 60 will lose their Accident and Emergency Departments and maternity departments, and will be left as shells.
The latest Department of Health figures show that this mass closure programme for A&Es is being adopted despite the fact that A&E visits in 2005-2006 rose to 18,759,104 from 17,837,180 in the previous year.
This massive increase in demand has been fuelled not by epidemics or unhealthy lifestyles but by government policy, which has caused the collapse of GP out-of-hours cover, and by the fact that the staff of the NHS Direct phone line have been adopting a ‘safety first’ approach, and are not trying to provide medical advice for conditions they have no undertanding of.
The re-configuration programme means that patients will simply be confined to their homes, where they will be left to sink or swim, with very few trained staff available to treat such large numbers satisfactorily ‘in the community’.
That all the NHS chickens are coming home to roost is also made clear by the rocketing figures for superbug deaths admitted by the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust.
Its spokesman said yesterday that the superbug Clostridium difficile had caused between 49 and 78 patients’ deaths in a nine month period.
The bug flourishes where there are dirty wards and a shortage of beds, both associated with the the government’s privatisation drive to replace in-house cleaning with private contractors, and the cutting of thousands of hospital beds.
Now is time for action to defend the NHS. The TUC must be made to call a general strike to bring down the Blair-Brown government to go forward to a workers’ government that will stop NHS privatisation and carry out socialist policies.
