Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Lies can't hide rising job toll

Socialist Resistance no37  |  page 11-12

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

cuts and closures.

But campaigns are stil starting up around the country. In Waltham Forest, angry health visitors and community staff have persuaded the council's Oversight and Scrutiny Committee to vote unanimously to use its power to block cuts by the PCT that would leave just one health visitor per 1,000 children.

In SE London UNISON's South London & Maudsley branch is launching a major community-wide "Hands Off Slam" campaign to halt £8m in cuts to mental health services being imposed by the PCTs Lambeth and Southwark.

There are plenty of signs that we are not yet too late to roll back some of the cuts and block further privatisation: but local campaigns have no time to lose. The privatisation juggernaut is cranking up and accelerating: we have a fight on our hands to Keep Our NHS Public!

More details on the campaigns from: www.healthemergency.org.uk www.keepuornhspublic.com The final week of June alone brought the announcement of at least another 1,350 job losses across the country, bringing the total since the beginning of the year to well above 17,000. and more still to come.

The first redundancy notices were handed out to nursing staff in Oxfordshire -and to the first two surgeons to face the axe as the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust struggles to save a massive 233 million.

Meanwhile, with more and more Trusts and Primary Care Trusts announcing job cuts, fewer staff are volunteering to leave, fearing that they will not find alternative jobs elsewhere: in a number of Trusts the expected scale of compulsory redundancies has increased.

The response of the Department of Health? Attack London Health Emergency which has been providing a running total on the job losses.

A statement issued by the DoH press office on June 29

"Health Emergency's figures are a work of fiction. They are out of tune with what is really happening in the NHS. They should check their facts."

In fact, in response to a separate inquiry by Sky TV, another hack in the same DoH Press Office had that day published job loss figures higher than those from Health Emergency!