06.07.1995

Unhealthy consensus

Health secretary: new face, same attacks

AS THE Labour Party published its new anti-working class health document and the Royal College of Nursing continued its go-it-alone approach, Unison and other health unions, representing 600,000 workers, are to ballot for industrial action after the collapse of negotiations last Monday.

This call to arms is badly prepared and long overdue. The union leaders have been sitting on the fence ever since the vicious pay attack was announced early in the year.

In a high-turnout ballot 96% of RCN members voted to end their policy banning industrial action. But the leadership is determined to sell its members short. General secretary Christine Hancock alleged that nurses had merely “voted to have a choice about taking limited industrial action at a local level” and added that there would be “no move from the centre” to organise action, let alone co-ordinate it with other unions. This is an open invitation for local deals, which the leadership will permit as soon as 300 out of 500 NHS trusts have offered a three percent pay increase without strings. Apparently this would somehow force the remaining 200 to fall into line.

The Royal College of Midwives has been bought off even more easily. It has accepted the pathetic one percent national ‘offer’ - with local negotiations for up to two percent more - in exchange for an agreement on its long-standing grading grievances.

Meanwhile the Labour Party’s policy document, Renewing the NHS, stabs healthworkers in the back. On pay, it calls for “local flexibility” within a national framework - just the kind of ‘support’ the unions need when they have placed opposition to local deals at the centre of the present campaign. The document should dash once and for all the illusions held by many workers that Blair’s party will provide an alternative in their interest.

The other main points are:

• A commitment to retain private practice. Labour will merely “discourage” NHS hospitals being run by the private sector and insist that the health service is “adequately recompensed” by private patients.
• The replacement of annual contracts between trusts and health authorities with longer-term “comprehensive health agreements”, thus fully accepting the idea that the market, not patients’ needs, should be the determining factor. The ‘official communist’ Morning Star pathetically described this change (now also favoured by ditched health secretary Virginia Bottomley) as introducing “the concept of co-operation in place of competition”(June 30).
• The aim of shorter waits for patients with more serious conditions.
• Token representation on the boards of trusts and health authorities for patients and local healthworkers.

Chris Ham, director of the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham, commented that “the degree of convergence between Labour and the Tories on health policy” was striking (The Independent June 30). He welcomed “the prospect of a new consensus emerging on the future of the NHS”.

On the other hand millions of workers are crying out for change, as our comrades working with the Unemployed Workers Charter’s health petition have discovered. We must smash through the “new consensus” and demand only the best for the working class. Healthworkers themselves need to build for strike action to ensure that the unions do not get away with RCM-type sell-outs.

Alan Fox

The UWC has called for 100,000 signatures by August on its petition for a health service we need. It demands:

• No cuts in the NHS! No hospital closures!

Healthcare for need, not profit.