Jeremy Corbyn
What Crisis? (The Morning Star)
Patricia Hewitt’s assertion that the NHS has had one of its best years ever sounded to me like one of those defining moments when political responses become detached from reality. Whilst it is true that more money than ever is going into the National Health Service and that it is much better than it ever was under the Tories, there are some huge problems. The first is the New Labour’s philosophy on health.
Blair, when in a corner during and election campaign, often barks back at critics that the NHS will remain free at the point of use, again true, but only partly. New Labour remains obsessed with not being part of the past when the NHS was all directly funded by taxation, its capital building programmes were the responsibility of central government, and its services were provided in house by directly employed staff. Even Thatcher did not feel able to destroy the NHS but her government obsessively privatised services within the NHS, encouraged the private medical market, and so under-funded the hospitals that huge queues and waiting lists built up.
Frank Dobson as the first Health Secretary after the 1997 election was very clear that health inequalities had to be tackled, and he put into effect the ideas of Professor Douglas Black, whose devastating report on the greater prevalence of preventable illness amongst the poorest was suppressed by the Tories after the 1979 election.
Frank was moved and Alan Milburn succeeded and was obsessed with private finance initiatives under which the private sector builds a shiny new building, gets the profits from servicing the building and we, the public, pay for it over and over again over many years.
Having decried the Tories for the internal market of the Health Service that the 1986 Health and Social Security Act brought about, the latest missives from the Department deliberately force key services into the private sector, and under the disguise of emergencies to reduce waiting lists, the NHS is buying space in private hospitals. The NHS has been reduced from being the proud provider of services, to the buyer of facilities it used to do itself.
All this has a cost, and will cost many millions of pounds. PFI (Private Finance Initiative) schemes that over-run are then sold on to other contractors, who then treat the long term servicing contract as an asset to be traded. In business terms it makes a lot of sense. The public guarantee the income for up twenty five years and the interest payments are huge. It was described by one of the health unions as like buying your house on a credit card.
There are now many health workers who are fearful of any announcement about deficits, as they are leading to hundreds of job losses all over the country. The management of the NHS by balance sheet and private finance, instead of the overwhelming priority of health care for those who need it will bring back all the inequalities and uncertainties that the 1997 election was supposed to put behind us.
Perhaps Patricia Hewitt could give us a real bumper year in 2006/7 by ending PFI schemes, bringing an end to the contracting culture, and providing job security for those staff who provide the real services that we all need.
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Does John Reid have any sense of history? It would seem he lacks this, and any sense of irony. His lightening trip to Afghanistan was to tell British soldiers that they must fight to ensure its future, and that it will be tough. No doubt it will, but he should remember that in the nineteenth century British soldiers were ordered over the Khyber Pass to subdue Afghanistan. They were annihilated in the process. Every other attempt to impose control from outside has failed. The invasion of 2001 by the US was based on the obsession of the Neo Conservatives with getting access to that part of Asia as much as it was of attacking the Taliban. Many of the thousands who died from bombing raids and occupation, who were taken to Guantanamo Bay, were just ordinary poor people.
The US has tired of its Afghan adventure, sensing failure, so the British have agreed to take over and we are about to witness more troops in Afghanistan than Iraq, with a mission to destroy opium crops. When the alternative to growing such crops is starvation it is easy to see why it happens; the solution is not military but it is in ensuring that farmers in the poorest regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan get sufficient income to live on.
The British troops will be a target in what is a colonial war, just like they were in the nineteenth century. The only difference is that it is not British imperialism, but the madness of the Project for a New American century that we are risking lives for.
Today “Military Families against the War” will be visiting Westminster to lobby MPs on future policies toward Iraq. These families have been through the horror and pain of the loss of loved ones, just as American and Iraqi families have. The difference is that in this war there is little public support for the whole strategy, and the families do not feel constrained from openly opposing the policy.
Tony Blair and John Reid were both around in the 1970s, and have probably seen “Born on the Fourth of July” when Ron Kovic, from his wheelchair, opposed and exposed the lies over Vietnam. This was the point when any vestige of credibility of the Vietnam adventure was blown.
As the military planners in their bunkers in Washington and London look at options for Iran, they should reflect on the scene above ground and outside in the fresh air. Wars come from greed and power. Every war creates a reaction and this time, in an age of rapid media information, millions can see the stupidity of the decision to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that peace will not come from more soldiers and more losses.
