We have one year to save the NHS, that’s why I’ll be voting for the National Health Action Party.
We have one year to save the NHS, that’s why I’ll be voting for the National Health Action Party
Whether we like it or not, the NHS’s last hope is that the Tories and Lib Dems get booted out next May, before they unstitch the entire fabric of our healthcare system. And a Labour government that is committed to saving it must be elected.
However, that doesn’t mean that you need to hold your nose and vote Labour just yet.
Just as the UKIP bandwagon wants to pick up the Conservative leadership and drop them off in a Euro-sceptic Promised Land next year, so a National Health Action Party (NHAP) result can direct the Labour Party manifesto. Only by getting Dr Louise Irvine elected as an MEP, the GP who chaired the spectacularly successful Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, will the Labour Party take notice of the importance of our health to our voting intentions.
New Labour sharpened the axe for NHS cuts, with marketisation, PFI and Foundation Trusts. But the coalition government has replaced the axe with a kamikaze aeroplane.
Firstly, despite no electoral mandate to re-organise the NHS, they replaced its entire working with a blueprint for mass privatisation in the Health and Social Care Act.
They removed the duty of the secretary of state to provide universal healthcare. They passed a Hospital Closure Clause (Clause 119) that allows the health secretary to use emergency powers to close any hospitals and services he likes, at the recommendation of people he will appoint. The last-ditch attempt by the Lords to add accountability to clause 119 could offer little protection to hospitals against the clause’s unjust power, arbitrarily applied.
On top of this are the cuts. The ‘Nicholson Challenge’ demands £20 billion of NHS cuts, in this climate of reorganisation and takeovers. Frontline jobs are disappearing, services are being cut. The greatest trick the Tories played was to convince us that the NHS never existed. As the population gets older and fatter, the population’s aggregated health needs have been re-categorised as the cause of the NHS’s problems, not the reason for its existence.
And despite being the Labour Party’s greatest legacy, the NHS will not be saved by until their manifesto reflects this.
Fully armed to destroy the NHS, the health secretary has now moved on a stage, and will spend a year trying to blow it apart. Jeremy Hunt signed up to a plan to replace the NHS with a system of ‘personal healthcare savings’ accounts – an idea that is even more exclusionary than a system of private insurance. His recent appointments at NHS England, Monitor and the CQC are designed to inflict as much damage as possible, as quickly as possible.
Simon Stevens comes to Monitor after spending the last nine years at American health firm, UnitedHealth. Before that, he was the man behind New Labour’s Independent Sector Treatment Centres. These featured agreements that gave massive sums to private health companies, regardless of the amount of work they botched, didn’t do or refused to do. It was the classic case of throwing money at problems (waiting lists) to make them go away, rather than investing in the NHS.
Dr David Bennett has stepped off the political/private-sector merry-go-round as the new chief executive of Monitor. Previous to this, he spent 18 years as a senior partner at private consultancy firm McKinsey and Co, and was then head of Tony Blair’s policy directorate. McKinsey, you may remember, received £250k a year to advise the government on the Health and Social Care Act.
The law they helped write now sends vast sums of money their way to advise CCGs on spending public money. And their former employee, Dr David Bennett, is the man in charge of enforcing commissioning rules, telling CCG’s what they must and must not do. For starters, they must not keep NHS services in-house without creating a commissioning process that will require costly, expert advice… from people like McKinsey.
The most brazen appointment to date, though, is David Prior, chair of the Care Quality Commission. He has the job of overseeing the NHS’s official regulator, the organisation that inspects the NHS and holds it to account. In the past, he was the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, and seems to have confused his role as an independent critic with that of a reforming ideologue, making pronouncements that the NHS will “go bust” if it doesn’t change.
These are the three kamikaze pilots willing to sacrifice their public sector jobs next year in the knowledge that their personal re-birth in the private sector will be more lucrative, heavenly even. The damage these QUANGOs and the healthcare market can do if given six more years to enact Tory changes will be undoable. The NHS will be a case study of a socialist healthcare system that was eroded then cannibalised by capitalism.
Andy Burnham has pledged to repeal the Health and Social Care Act if he becomes health secretary. This would undo the hospital closure clause, the wholesale privatisation, and reinstate the duty of the secretary of state to provide universal healthcare to the people who voted for them.
Labour should also take the responsibility for PFI debts off the books of individual trusts, if not renegotiate or default on them. They should never have been obliged to repay exorbitant debts for buildings that are part of a national health service. The original NHS hospitals were not built, during the post-war austerity era, by placing massive financial burdens on local organisations. A healthcare trust cannot meet PFI debts and meet the health needs of a local population as things stand.
Something has to give, and for too long, it’s been the local health needs.
If an NHAP candidate is elected in Europe, Ed Miliband can no longer hide from the biggest issue facing the health of his and his party’s future. It should catalyse a Labour revival on the NHS, inspired by the mobilisations already seen to save hospitals in Lewisham and Staffordshire.
The Conservative Party will spend one year in charge, butchering the NHS for their financiers, executing the destructive laws they’ve passed. The left has one year to make the Labour Party salvage it.
Iain Wilson is a nurse and was secretary of the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign
12 Responses to “The left has one year to make the Labour Party salvage the NHS”
George Hallam
“Labour Party’s greatest legacy, the NHS”
The danger with crediting one party with the creation of the
NHS is that this encourages people to think that the blame for the attack on
the NHS also lies with one party. And if you think that, then the you could well
assume that the NHS can only be saved by changing the government. That would be
a cardinal error.
And as it turns out the NHS is not the legacy of one party…
treborc1
Labour was in for five years 1945 to 1951 and then got booted out the NHS was then for the next three terms Tory. The Tories may well have run down the NHS ready for the private sector and labour got in and decided the sale of the NHS was right as they did for the Post office Royal mail the Royal Mint and god knows what else.
And now out comes vote labour to save the NHS your joking of course , what next Education education education.
Leon Wolfeson
I don’t believe for a second that a government less aspirational than the 1945 Labour one could have delivered the NHS. The system before that was a mess which the Tories had failed to change in any comprehensive way.
It was far, far too popular for them to attack in the governments after that, certainly, and those Tory governments “took over” and pushed on areas like the NHS and housing – and it worked for them, politically.
George Hallam
Okay, you’ve told that us that you don’t believe that a government “less aspirational than the 1945 Labour one” could have delivered the NHS. Now all you have to do is to show that other governments that might have been formed* would have been “less aspirational “.
So could conservatives and liberals be committed to a welfare state?
I suppose the creation of welfare states across most of Western Europe after the end of the Second World War just shows how ‘aspirational’ people were then.
This raises the question of where all these aspirations came from.
Could it have anything to do with the defeat of fascism and the start of a cold war against a poor country that established a working universal health service?
Just a thought.
* Actually, the most likely alternative to a Labour government in 1945 was a coalition. In fact, the Labour leaders expected that this would happen and shaped their commitments to this end.
Iain Wilson
It doesn’t say vote labour. It does say to vote for NHAP, and that an NHAP vote could push the labour manifesto into something worth voting for.
And I think the point was that the NHS was their legacy, not their sole creation.