The left wing group will still be running the socialist society's committee
The Labour left has retained control of one of the Labour Party’s affiliated socialist societies. The Socialist Health Association (SHA) is the party’s main body campaigning on health issues and has been affiliated to Labour for over 90 years.
Mark Ladbrooke was re-elected as the chair of SHA. He will be joined on the committee by a majority of other Momentum-backed candidates.
With Ladbrooke as chair, the SHA has repeatedly clashed with the labour leadership, particularly over the role of the private sector in the NHS. The SHA has criticised shadow health secretary Wes Streeting’s support for using private hospitals to tackle current backlogs in the health service. In a statement released in January, the group said that Streeting was “wrong” to suggest that the private sector had greater capacity to clear backlogs or that it was more efficient.
Ladbrooke, alongside re-elected SHA secretary Harry Stratton and re-elected SHA treasurer Esther Giles issued a joint statement celebrating their victory in the elections. The statement read, “SHA members recognise that accelerating moves to integrate private providers into the health service will drain funding from the NHS and turn it into a mere brand for a mess of private corporations- all extracting shareholder returns and cutting services in order to do so.
“Big corporations have captured top NHS bodies with the intention of funnelling NHS resources into their pockets. They train few- if any- staff and maintain a parasitic role in the sector. Members of Labour’s front bench are deeply mistaken if they believe these businesses will resolve the catastrophic problems caused by decades of neoliberal austerity and service cuts.”
Sasha Das Gupta, Vice-Chair of Momentum, also welcomed the results. She said, “Labour members, trade unions and the public all agree – we need to end the scourge of NHS privatisation. Shamefully, however, Starmer and Streeting are completely out of step with the mood in the party and the public – they seem to think the privatisation agenda which helped get our NHS into this mess is the way out. We will work to hold them to account by every means necessary, so that the next Labour manifesto promises to kick out the private sector from our NHS, once and for all.”
Candidates from other wings of the party have been critical of the way in which the elections were run. A statement signed by 17 candidates in the elections to the central committee called for the resignation of the returning officer, asked for the Labour Party to review SHA’s affiliation and alleged irregularities within the electoral process.
The full breakdown of the election results can be found here.
The SHA is one of 20 socialist societies affiliated to the Labour Party, including the Fabian Society, LGBT+ Labour and BAME Labour. Socialist societies are membership organisations which – like affiliated trade unions – have a formal role within the Labour Party’s decision making structures, with members of affiliated societies having a vote in leadership elections.
Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward
Image credit: FunkDooby – Creative Commons
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