LAST Friday’s mass picket of Ealing Hospital called by the West London Council of Action has shown the way forward for defending the NHS from the brutal attacks by the Tory government.
Attacks in Ealing, as in the rest of the country, place money saving cuts before the lives of every man, woman and child. The brutality of the Tory cuts couldn’t be more exposed than in the plans to close the Charlie Chaplin children’s ward and end all children’s services at the hospital on June 30th.
With no paediatric consultants at Ealing to provide specialist treatment for children the ambulance service will be instructed not to take any child to Ealing A&E department. Any child rushed to Ealing A&E by a worried parent would be forced to wait for transport to another hospital in the area.
All these delays endanger the lives of children needing emergency treatment. By turning the A&E department into an ‘adults only’ unit the hospital authorities and the Clinical Commissioning Group that approved this closure are consciously paving the way to close the A&E completely at Ealing leading to the inevitable ending of Ealing Hospital as a general hospital.
The closure of the children’s ward is itself part of a massive NHS ‘reform’ programme in West London that will see 500 acute beds being axed along with ambulance blue-light services at Charing Cross Hospital in nearby Hammersmith. A&E units at Hammersmith and Central Middlesex hospitals have already closed as has the maternity unit at Ealing.
All these closures and cuts, made in a desperate attempt to avoid a massive £1 billion deficit in the health budget, have been insisted upon by NHS England which has instructed all 44 NHS regions throughout the country to come up with a five-year plan to cut government spending on the health service to the bone regardless of the cost to patients.
This is a Tory government that doesn’t give a damn about the lives of children, only in bailing out the bankers. These plans to destroy the NHS have met with a storm of protest from local communities up in arms about seeing the NHS butchered by a Tory government only interested in bringing down national debt.
But protest alone will not stop the Tories. What is called for is a programme of action that goes beyond simple protest. Such a programme was advanced by the West London Council of Action at its mass picket on Friday. This fighting programme calls for the trade unions at the hospital to hold emergency meetings to decide that they will not allow closure of the ward, that they will not accept the transfer of staff and that they will occupy to prevent closure.
It calls on all trade unions and the entire community in West London to take strike action on June 29th, march to the hospital, and occupy the threatened services to prevent them from being closed down. It further calls on the local Labour MPs – shadow chancellor John McDonnell, Virendra Sharma, Rupa Huq and Stephen Pound – to head this demonstration and to declare their determination to take all steps necessary to stop closure of the children’s services and to defeat the Tories.
This is the way forward for the struggle to defend not just the NHS but every public service and every job threatened by the collapse of industry. It stands in stark contrast to the shameful inactivity of the leadership of the trade unions who have not lifted a single finger to defend the NHS, jobs, pensions or working conditions all of which are under attack by this weak, discredited Tory government.
These are demands that must be taken up by the working class across the country. Build Councils of Action in every area to unite trade unionists with youth and the community to organise and defend strikes and occupations to prevent a single service or industrial plant being closed.
Organise a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers government and socialism. This is the way forward.
