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From Militant, No. 392, 10 February 1978, p. 1.
Transcribed by Iain Dalton.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Spending cuts are devastating the Health Service throughout the country.
Shop stewards in Tower Hamlets, London, have launched a major campaign against this brutal financial surgery. They are to mount a propaganda campaign to inform and mobilise the thousands of hospital and other health workers in the health district. Their indignation and anger, stewards hope, will be directed into the labour movement so that other workers will also join the campaign.
Because funds are short, beds are to be reduced. If this goes through, 360 acute beds would go, and hundreds of jobs be lost. Already wards have been closed temporarily due to a ‘shortage’ of some 116 nurses. Further such closures are planned. Many of the beds are to be reallocated to accommodate geriatric patients from hospitals marked for closure.
Services are already stretched to the limit. Waiting lists are getting longer, and more people are having to wait 18 months and longer. More patients are admitted as emergency cases; ambulancemen have to search round districts for empty beds. Because of the age and condition of most hospital buildings, many are dilapidated and should be replaced. No-one would deny the great need for better facilities for the aged, for example.
The only new building going up in Tower Hamlets at the moment, however, is the new wing at Whitechapel. This building is costing £6 millions or more, will take 3½ years to complete, and it will not have a single bed in it!
Hospital workers are demanding that new buildings should be provided before there are any closures. They want new beds in the new block, and also want an existing private wing for NHS patients.
Management say they haven’t the money to staff hospitals adequately. But cash is still pouring into the coffers of the private drug companies – consuming 43% of primary care costs, for example. It is also lining the pockets of private contractors exploiting the NHS.
This is why a political struggle is necessary. This is why effort
in the campaign should be directed to involving the health workers
and local workers more actively in their trade unions and the Labour Party.
Health workers must close ranks and put a stop to the disintegration of the NHS. Every single job and every single bed must now be defended. The “commando” operation at Hounslow Hospital has shown the lengths to which management are prepared to go to enforce their plans. Tower hamlets health workers have taken note!
Jane Doyle, a nurse shop steward who is also National Union of Public Employees delegate to the Tower Hamlets Labour Party, reported that a resolution on the NHS from the Labour Party Young Socialists had received unanimous backing at the Party’s management committee. It deplored the hospital closures, and expressed alarm at their drastic effects in the borough, in terms of lost health facilities and more hardship in an area already suffering 13% unemployment.
It demanded that the government returns to its Manifesto pledge, not only to defend the NHS, but to expand it.
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Last updated: 11 February 2017