Brexit fallout will fuel further NHS anger
A WOMAN falls over, breaks her foot and then dies in hospital after waiting six hours for an ambulance in the freezing cold. This is the state of our NHS as we enter the 2020s.
This is not the fault of NHS workers who, with a shortage of 40,000 nurses, are already stretched to breaking point. Nor is it the fault of patients who go to A&E for nonemergency treatment – average waiting times to see a GP are at an all-time high and walk-in centres often just refer you to A&E.
No, the blame for such incidents lies squarely with successive capitalist governments (and yes, this includes Tony Blair’s Labour) who opened up our NHS to privatisation, attacked the conditions of its workers, cut bursaries for those wishing to study to enter the health service, and made massive and savage cuts to its funding.
Because of austerity, social care is in permanent crisis. Hospital beds are frequently blocked because there are no community services to access once patients leave. This is literally costing lives.
And who do the Tories blame? Socalled “health-tourists” – a group which accounts for a miserly 0.3 per cent of NHS funding. To put this number into perspective, the Kings Fund, an independent charity, estimates that parasitic corporations and non-NHS organisations bleed as much as 22 per cent from the NHS’s annual budget.
The Tories’ latest plans to spend an extra £34 billion in the NHS (£20.4 billion when adjusted for inflation) over the next five years reflects their vulnerability over the health service. But because of years of underfunding and the rising cost of healthcare, this is not enough to even maintain existing crisis-ridden services, let alone improve them.
The Tories have said nothing about the capital budget – the money used for maintaining buildings and equipment – beyond the next year. The cost for the backlog of repairs alone has now reached more than £6 billion, resulting in dilapidated wards and broken infrastructure.
Boris Johnson’s promise to restore the nurse’s bursary also went up in smoke when it was announced that student nurses will still have to pay tuition fees – not the case in 2016 when the bursary was scrapped – leaving them with crippling debt.
We cannot afford to be divided. We need to build a mass movement now to save our NHS, linking up patients, workers, and families to defend and extend our services.
If, or when, a Brexit deal is reached on pharmaceutical companies’ access to the NHS, then there will be further anger and the basis for further struggle.
Get involved in the fightback now.
Tom Barker, Leicester