Leading with the left
Leading with the left
UNISON's London Region convenor takes a lefty look at life.
With the NHS rapidly approaching its 50th birthday in July, you might have thought that the labour movement would be preparing a major bash to mark one of its finest achievements. You would be wrong. So far, the evidence suggests that the only events in the PiPeline are being organised by NHS managers at local level. Car boot sales and tombolas are being pencilled in and junior Health Minister Paul Boateng is going to give a sermon. I can hardly wait.
With the Independent reporting that up to 80 hospitals across the UK face closure or merger under New Labour, wouldn't the fiftieth birthday of the NHS be the ideal point for the unions to mobilise a massive public demonstration in defence of the basic principles of health care free at the point of need?
Leaving the celebrations to the same NHS top brass who have been ripping the service to shreds since the Tory reforms of 1990 is madness. It's like asking Frank Field and Harriet Harman to organise a benefit for the Welfare State Network.
I recently spoke at a meeting in Canterbury where the local hospital is threatened with closure and where regular demonstrations of over 6,000 people have been hitting the streets. When 6,000 people take to the streets of Canterbury you know that there's something big going down. Similar protests in defence of the NHS are kicking off all over the UK. Why not bring them all together in one place to mark the NHS's half century?
Talking of hitting the streets, thanks to Labour Left Briefing I ended up having to travel in to central London on the day of the Countryside Alliance march. From what I saw -- top of the range Land Rovers and designer leisure wear -- the argument that the march was a mobilisation of impoverished farm labourers was total garbage. What the march really represented was the first stirrings of the organised hard right since the general election.
The pitiful capitulation of the Labour front bench to this bunch of landed scroungers showed us yet again that this is a government that responds to pressure. For the past ten months all of that pressure has come from the right. The tobacco industry, the newspaper proprietors and the fox torturers have all forced concession after concession out of Blair and his cohorts. So when is organised labour going to latch on to this reality?
I was delighted to hear John Edmonds from the GMB saying that the unions should take note of the Government's response to the Countryside Alliance and begin preparing to put hundreds of thousands of our members on the streets in support of the trade union agenda. The question is when John, when?
What will be the trigger for a major official mobilisation? Will it be a sell-out of workplace rights, a dragging down of the minimum wage rate or the continuing squeeze on our public services? All or any of these will do as far as I'm concerned. Our job now is to force the pace for national action from local and regional level. We need that pressure on!
Next month...more football nostalgia from the early 70's.
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