Emergency Foundation Hospitals, private DTCs, PFI.. Dragging us back to Market • Tony Benn • Prof Allyson Pollock • Margie Jaffe (UNISON Positively Public Campaign) • John Lister, LHE
Thursday October 16 7.30pm, Friends House, Eustion Rd WC1 opposite Eustion staffion Open to all, especially health workers and compaigners
[email protected], www.healthemergency.org.uk figures and press comment on the growing crisis in the NHS.
"We didn't soft-pedal the campaigning. either. We backed strikes and struggles against cuts and closures. In 1987 we started publishing round-ups of the NHS crisis across the capital. The press started ringing regularly. They quoted and interviewed us and raised HE's profile further. Journalists found our facts and figures always stood up: we gained more respect, and they kept coming back for more.
"As the "winter crisis" of 1987 grew in the after victory, we gathered a massive petition of 1,200 consultants across the country percentage!" events of 1988? unsocial hours. demanding more funds. In the December Thatcher announced an extra £100 million health spending - we should have been on a So you were well placed for the "Yes, it was an amazing year, the 40th anniversary year of the NHS. It began with an unofficial strike by Manchester nurses demanding improved payments for working
"We had already set up a trade union rally in the Camden Centre for February 3 with backing from most London health unions. 40,000 leaflets had gone out for it.
"So February 3 became the date for a massive wave of unofficial strikes by nurses across London and in many other cities, too. The rally was packed out, with over 1,000 inside, and nurses in uniform spilling out and blocking the Euston Road outside.
"That period marked the arrival of nurses as an industrial force, after years in which ancillary staff had dominated the health unions. There were disputes all year:
"In the same year Thatcher began herbizarre, secretive "review" of the NHS which culminated in the market reforms of 1990-91. And later there was also the Griffiths Report on community care, further privatising the care of older people and introducing new means-tested charges.
"When we denounced Griffiths, the Labour-led borough of Islington - which supported his report - was the first to axe our funding, trying to shut us up." They obviously didn't succeed? "Because our fundingsame from many dif bris sis ferent sources, no one organisation could less tell us what to do. In fairness not many peo"The affiliation base ensured we could continue campaigning and working with unions even as we delivered "independent"
By early 1989 Thatcher had unveiled her market-style "reform" package, and by that point we were well placed to champi
"We sold thousands of copies of our Hands Off Our NHS pamphlet, and tens of thousands of leaflets, car stickers and posters - all over the country.
"We spoke at meetings and rallies. As the White Paper became the Bill we campaigned all over the country against hospi- cuts tals opting out as Trusts. I remember speaking at one rally in High Wycombe, stuffed with stockbrokers, retired majors and unlikely types - they were up for a fight against Thatcher's reforms." The market reforms destabilised London's hospitals, didn't they? "Yes, we warned right up to the 1992 election that the Tories would axe thousands of
*That autumn the Tomlinson report was launched, proposing closing 4,000 beds and three teaching hospitals in London: We got a copy the evening before, and press released it - destroying their press launch. Finance Initiative. And there were campaigns with the unions on issues such as care of the elderly and mental health." .... We made the front page of most daily papers next morning: it was our biggest coup!
"We worked closely with the London Region of COHSE (one of the health unions that merged to form UNISON and we stepped up the campaigning over the next year under the slogan "Londoners need London's Hospitals"
"This led on to working with campaigns in defence of Guy's, Charing Cross, Bart's and Edgware Hospitals in London, and hospitals and services all over the country.
"We also got stuck in to fighting the Private Finance Initiative. And there were campaigns with the unions on issues such as care of the elderly and mental health." So by 1997 LHE was king of the hill among campaigns? "We had a very wide recognition - UNISON was affiliated nationally, and in a number of regions, and over 100 branches. But we could also work with MS now Amicus), GMB and other unions, with pensioners' campaigns, with many Labour Parties, with a lot of councillors and council officers, and with lots of MPs - including most of the shadow health team running up to the election.
"But it was obvious we were going to have a problem if Labour won. Gordon Brown was already committed to sticking to Tory cash limits for 3 years- which of course he duly did. That had to mean more
"Labour had also turned turtle and adopted the Private Finance Initiative. They had ducked any commitment to scrap charges for care of the elderly, and avoided any pledges on mental health.
"We had a choice: become toadies after May 1997, and hope for a handout from the Blair team - or continue as a resource for unions and campaigners.
"Actually it was never a choice: as soon as they had won the election, with a few gallant exceptions, almost all the Labour MPs who had worked with us against the Tories changed their line to fit in with the new establishment, and took their distance.
"Alan Milburn who had been a master at
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cutting down Tory lies, switched into a master of double-speak as junior minister.
"When Frank Dobson eventually set up an inquiry into NHS bed numbers who did he ask to do it? One of the civil servants who had helped to close thousands of beds under Thatcher!.
*We were too independent for our own good. Even Ken Livingstone, who had promised to publish independent information on the NHS if elected as Mayor decided to wheel in an NHS bureaucrat as his health advisor rather than ask us!" Where does that leave HE now, "It's almost deja vue as New Labour ministers re-create the market system they boasted about scraping in 1997-98.
"We have continued to fight PFl, to oppose all forms of ivatisation, and to demand proper resourcing of the NHS. It The government's response to the Laming inquiry, in the wake of the brutal murder of Victoria Climbie, is detailed in its new Children's Green Paper, published in early September and titled 'Every Child Matters'.
But when a recent poll on the website of Community Care, a magazine for people working in social care, asked will the Green Paper on children prevent another child dying in the ance October 2003
Child protectior