Higher Education (HE) in the UK is under
attack. Members of staff see a year on year decline in their real income and
their pensions undermined, students face tuition fees of up to £9000 per year.
There are clear signs that more and more parts of HE are to be privatised. And
yet, HE is not the only sector suffering from cuts and austerity in the UK. The
national health service, provisions for disabled people and Schools are subject
to similar restructuring. In order to highlight the broader dimension of the
coalition government’s assault on the welfare state, the local UCU association
at Nottingham University organised an event on Friday, 15 March to discuss the
impact on the health service and some local moments of resistance.
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| Photo by Byzantine_K |
The invited speakers were Sharon Vasselin and
Paul Martin, both joint secretaries of the local Trades Council and members of
the local Broxtowe Save Our NHS group.
Sharon Vasselin, who works in the health sector and is a Unison rep, outlined
some key aspects of the government’s attack on the National Health Service
(NHS). From April onwards, health service contracts also have to be offered to
private health care providers, who will compete with NHS units. The consequence
is clear, private providers will cherry pick those parts of the health service,
which are profitable, such as walk-in treatment centres, and leave the more
complex tasks to the NHS. In a way, Sharon Vasselin argued, the NHS is set up
to fail in this scenario. While patients may receive similar levels of services
from these privatised units during the initial years, this is highly likely to
decline later on. Moreover, private providers in health care will lead to a
two-tier labour market, where workers in private facilities will earn less and
have less good pensions than in the NHS. Downward pressure on wages and working
conditions across the sector is the inevitable result.
How can resistance be organised? The current
Unison line is to put as many spanners into the privatisation process as
possible until the next election, when hopefully a new, more sympathetic
government comes to power and is prepared to reverse the changes. Paul Martin
picked up on this point and made clear that the most important goal of the Broxtowe Save Our NHS campaign was
regime change, the de-selection of the current Conservative MP Anna Soubry. As
she is a junior
minister in the Department of Health, the
NHS was the main area to campaign on. He further discussed how this campaign
was cooperating with a whole range of other campaigns organising the resistance
against austerity at the local level and for regime change at the national
level.
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| Photo by Byzantine_K |
Participants
at the meeting agreed that a change in government was the absolute precondition
for a change in current policy and for saving the NHS. And yet, was it not the
Labour government, which had started many restructuring initiatives also in the
NHS, when in power from 1997 to 2010? Are not current privatisation efforts in
the health sector facilitated by past Labour policies? And, if so, what
guarantees do we have that another government would actually also reverse the
changes currently implemented by the coalition government? In his concluding
comments, Paul Martin made clear that regime change in government is not enough
in itself. Some change has to occur also within the Labour Party itself to
guarantee a change in overall policy (see also A
socialist alternative through the Labour Party?). What is clear, however,
is that isolated struggles against restructuring of individual sectors will not
be successful. Struggles against the cuts in HE need to link up with struggles
against NHS restructuring as well as other anti-austerity struggles.
Prof. Andreas Bieler
Professor of Political Economy
University of Nottingham/UK
22 March 2013
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