In the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, John Ball said, “Nothing will go well in England until all things shall be held in common”.
I went to Trafalgar Square, just downstream from Piccadilly, in London for a huge NHS rally earlier this year. It’s where crowds had also gathered in 1945, for VE day to celebrate winning the Second World War.
As we face a general election on May 7th 2015, something akin to the ‘spirit of ’45” arguably needs to be mobilised. It is sometimes easy to escape seeing the wood from the trees, with discussions firmly footed in the immediate, such as a leaked memo by Labour on immigration, or a brouhaha between Russell Brand and Nigel Farage.
We still need the same type of military discipline to build a Britain fit for purpose for peacetime. Successive mainstream governments have allowed themselves to sing to the neoliberal tune. It’s clear that in some places this hand has been overplayed, such as the ‘benefits’ of competition to the NHS. Because of the ‘market’ in the NHS for the first time under this Government, a hospital merger reasoned on the basis of clinical need could not take place because of competition law.
We’ve been sucked into this false narrative, and we are still not free of it. But if we return to a collective spirit anything is possible.
Whilst both Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill clearly wanted the words of FA Hayek (“The Road to Serfdom”) to be widely read, it is a sad admission that the market is not in fact liberalising; it can be best described as positively “enslaving”.
Markets free from public ownership are dogged with waste and inefficiency. Water and gas are homogenous products; they form natural monopolies which need to be organised properly.
In 1947, the UK parliament set up the British Transport Commission. One of the first steps was to abolish in Euston around the time, the ‘clearing house‘ of hundreds of clerk to oversee the administration of transactions between private companies.
Move forward to the time of this Government, some private outsourcing companies have also been dogged further with illegal fraud allegations. They also escape the Freedom of Information Act.
Very few of us want a NHS where your access is treatment is dependent upon your ability to pay. But only today it was reported that acute dermatology services would be taken out of scope in Nottingham and Lincoln for example.
It remains the case that Governments should respond to people’s needs, and have people with a strong public service interest to organise facilities around these needs. The primary driver cannot be profit, especially excessive profit. The section 75 clause of the Health and Social Care Act ram raided the NHS with competitive market tendering. The result has been some mouth watering contracts go to the private sector; this is privatisation, meeting the WHO’s own definition of the transfer of resources.
We want a world where the world is adapted for needs, and democratic.
It’s not a question of buying influence with money. The most effective route to exerting influence is the careful use of the democratic vote. A vote on Farage is likely to be an opportunity missed, when you could vote for the full integration of health and care services or ‘whole person care’.
We should NOT fight with each other.
Nurses should not struggle on and on, many without pay rises, creating value in the NHS, while private equity cream off proceeds from the wealth that they create through a series of abstract transactions.
Nurses and all workers including allied health professionals and doctors OWN the National Health Service – the City shouldn’t.
The Beveridge Report spurred us on as a country to combat five giant evils.
As described in an article in the Guardian earlier this year,
“Beveridge, however, was on to something in basing his report on the need to tackle five “giant evils”: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. His list has stood the test of time so well that when the IPPR thinktank published recently its Condition of Britain analysis, it revisited the five topics for an update. Verdict: work still in progress.”
“Want” is still a problem with many people needing to ‘top up’ their income with working tax credits. It doesn’t matter if we have a record number of people in employment, if these people are underemployed. They are working, but they are still poor. A spirit of 2015 needs to address abuses of zero hour contracts. Too many paid carers are providing care in fifteen minute slots, not being paid a proper wage, and not being paid adequately as power towards scrupulous employers has again swung too far.
Idleness is not a criticism easily levelled at men and women who are working extremely hard, and finding it hard to make ends meet with a rampant cost of living crisis. We want resources to be distributed properly, so no longer fat cats are sitting on huge salaries while there’s misery.
What has happened over welfare benefits, with an army of disabled citizens burnt out with worry, is a public disgrace. The UK should be proud of its value where we all pool risks and we all feel responsible for everyone else: we are our brothers’ keepers. As a civilised country, we should be ashamed if we don’t care for disabled or elderly members of our society, for example.
If resources could be organised properly in the Second World War, our resources can be organised properly now. Why has inequality got considerably worse under Thatcher’s government and beyond?
Things are so bad that members of the general public have utter ignorance about their legal rights being demolished. 2012 saw the Legal Aid and Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act and annihilation of English law centres. Furthermore, Chris Grayling who has never done a law degree so can be reasonably expected to be ignorant about aspects of the law has presided over demolition of judicial review and privatisation of probation.
The Commonwealth Fund found recently that the UK has one of the best health systems in the world. Put simply, the NHS won’t be able to survive another unexpected top down NHS reorganisation from the Conservatives designed to privatise the NHS yet further. We have 800 000 people living with dementia, and yet we have social care on its knees. Despite the high profile ‘Prime Minister’s Dementia Challenge’ and G8 dementia, one can rightly moot whether Pharma has benefited more than people living with dementia or caregivers.
No party wishes to doubt the prestige of the National Health Service, even though the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats produced the legislation in 2012 to turboboost its destruction.
Whereas Nye Bevan joked at the time of the creation of the NHS, ‘doctors’ mouths were stuffed with silver’, almost seventy years later corporate competition lawyers’ mouths were stuffed with silver.
Squalor does exist still. It is tempting to want to believe squalor doesn’t exist. But it does (as shown here).
As Tony Benn warned numerous times, politicians go round and round in circles.
Winston Churchill wanted after 1945 for the Conservatives to lead the UK to prosperity.
Winston Churchill wanted in 1945 to be given “the tools to finish the job”.
The Daily Express on the morning of the general election in 1945 urged voters to return Mr Churchill.
Clem Attlee for Labour, on the other hand, won with a landslide.
In 2014, David Cameron has asked for a mandate to lead the UK to prosperity and to ‘finish the job’.
You know what to do.
