The incoming Tory government promised it wouldn’t privatise the NHS. It’s doing it anyway (see Mythbuster below). But a recent victory has lessons for campaigners, says Stephen Cowden
‘Keep Our NHS Public’ is a campaign group that seeks to defend the NHS as a publicly owned service that stays true to its founding principles: that healthcare should be freely available to everyone on the basis of need, not ability to pay. Our NHS is under threat, as never before, from the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act. The purpose of this is to transform the NHS into a competitive market where “any willing provider” can bid against public bodies to provide health services. The door has been opened for profit-seeking businesses to take over large swathes of our health service. The attempt to halt this bill failed in 2012, but we have been campaigning to frustrate its progress ever since.
What happened locally
The George Eliot hospital in Nuneaton had been going through this tendering process, selling up the running and management of the hospital to private firms. The bids have now been halted. Around 70 people attended a meeting at the Bermuda Phoenix Centre, Nuneaton, on 2 April, to celebrate this victory for campaigners. The meeting was addressed by Lord Hunt (Labour spokesperson on health), Rachel Maskell and Frank Keogh from the Unite trade union, and local campaigner Karen Evans. All speakers felt that keeping private companies out of George Eliot represented a huge victory for local people against big business, and Karen Evans noted just how much support there was for the campaign in the wider community.
It is the battle rather than the war that had been won, however. Lord Hunt spoke of his concern for the way the NHS as an integrated service is being steadily undermined by cuts to both the NHS and local authorities. This affects many frail elderly people who should be leaving hospital and returning home, but cannot do so due to the decimation of local-authority services. But while frontline services are being cut, plenty of money is being made available for yet another entirely unnecessary, ideologically driven reorganisation of the NHS, which Rachel Maskell from Unite said is costing the NHS at least £3 billion.
It is the services in the greatest area of need that are most under attack, widening health inequalities, and reducing access to healthcare. Frank Keogh from Unite noted that, even though the tendering process for George Eliot had been halted, the whole process had still cost South Warwickshire Foundation Trust £100,000 and the Coventry Foundation Trust the same figure. That is public money which could have gone to patients. Thanks to the Tories’ act, it is now ending up in the pockets of consultants and lawyers.
Lessons to be learned
There are important lessons to be learned from this campaign. The first is that the public is very much behind campaigning for a publicly owned and provided NHS. A recent poll by the Class think tank found that more than 80% of the British public agree that the NHS should stay in public hands. However, it is essential to build alliances between local people, healthcare unions and campaigns such as Keep Our NHS Public if we are to be successful and stop the government’s determination to privatise the NHS.
If we want the NHS to remain a publicly provided and accountable service, it is clear we are going to have to fight for it. As Karen Evans told the meeting: “When you stand together you can do it! We all need to say loud and clear that Big Business has no business in the NHS!”
Stephen Cowden is a campaigner with the South Warwickshire ‘Keep Our NHS Public’ campaign.
Mythbuster: is the NHS really for sale?
Is the NHS really being sold off? The Tories promised it was safe in their hands at the election. They lied. They were always determined to accelerate the break-up of the NHS, started by Thatcher, and continued under Labour. Already a tenth of surgeries are privately owned, and contracts worth millions of pounds have been given to the likes of Virgin.
But this is inevitable – we can’t afford the NHS. If we can’t afford the NHS, we certainly can’t afford private healthcare either. But in fact, studies have consistently shown the NHS to be one of the most cost-effective services in the world.
‘Health tourism’ is bankrupting the NHS. Unrecovered costs from treating foreign nationals account for less than 0.2% of the NHS budget. While informing us of this minor cost, the government has cut £20 billion from the service.
Private firms will deliver a more efficient NHS and cost us less. There is not a scrap of evidence that this is true. Hospital cleaning has shown the reality of privatisation: apparent short-term savings, but at the expense of dangerously lower standards for patients and NHS workers, and higher costs in the long run.
The reforms will give patients more choice. Patients have less choice now than they did 20 years ago. Then, GPs could send a patient to see any provider. Now, they are obliged to meet targets and many operations once available from the NHS are increasingly being rationed or withdrawn.
For more information along the same lines, see here and here.
Leamington Spark 