Rally “to save NHS” this Saturday
Article published: Tuesday, February 28th 2012
A rally against plans to implement controversial NHS changes will be held in Manchester this Saturday, March 3. The demonstration comes as the government’s Health and Social Care Bill, widely criticised by medical associations, enters its final stages in Parliament.
The demonstration will begin at 11am in Albert Square, opposite Manchester Town Hall, and has been called for the public sector trade union Unison and the North West TUC. Organisers say the protests are intended to raise awareness ahead of a national lobby of Westminster on March 7.
Speakers include Shameless actor Christopher Bisson, Tameside GP and author of the 160,000 – strong “drop the healthcare bill” e-petition Dr Kailash Chand, and shadow health secretary Andy Burnham MP.
The Bill, denounced as “a mess” by former NHS chief executive Lord Crisp, has drawn strong criticism in recent weeks. Opponents include the British Medical Association, the Royal College of GPs and several medical royal colleges, and a recent article in prestigious clinical journal the Lancet branded the reforms “the end of the NHS as we know it”.
A spokesperson for Manchester Unison argued that “under the Bill there is nothing to stop all NHS services being taken over by private providers”, claiming that Coalition healthcare policies threaten “to undermine the very principles of a successful and efficient health care system.”
Changes entailed in the Bill include the scrapping of “Primary Care Trusts”, bodies responsible for providing services within specific geographical areas. Instead, powers for purchasing care currently held by the Health Secretary will be devolved to GP – led “Clinical Commissioning Groups” (CCGs) with an “NHS Commissioning Board” intended to oversee them.
Key clauses of the Bill will dismantle the legal “duty to provide” specific services currently held by the health secretary, replaced by a watered-down “duty to arrange” services held by CCGs. CCGs will have greater powers to determine what care counts as meeting reasonable requirements, and opponents fear that commissioning duties will be contracted out to private companies driven by the need to make profits.
Commenting on the reforms, the Manchester Unison spokesperson warned that “GPs in particular will be put in the difficult position of having to diagnose their patients and recommend the best course of treatment, and on the other hand to refuse to supply it because as commissioners their budgets are under pressure.”
The government argues that the reforms are necessary if the NHS is to remain affordable as the average age of the British population increases, with Chancellor George Osborne telling Press Association reporters that “as society ages, as we live longer, we have got to have an NHS that can afford new treatments and that’s an NHS that offers choice, that brings in different providers.”
Richard Goulding
Want to take Dr Chand’s petition past 160,000? Sign it
Manchester Mule are currently looking for new editors – check out the blog post here for details
More: News, Unions and workplace, Welfare
Comments
-
It’ll really just be a rally of NHS workers keen to keep their generous pay and conditions, and demanding that the rest of us pay for them.
NHS staff, for their skill levels, are well paid, get fantastic pensions, have more holidays than the average worker, retire earlier, work shorter hours and take more sick days.
If NHS staff really are as caring and compassionate as they shamelessly tell us they are, they’d be eager to work for the same pay and benefits as the people they claim to care so much about.
Comment by pete on February 29, 2012 at 12:40 pm -
Best ignore Pete,
NHS workers are no better or worse than the rest of us and with the same varied levels of pay and conditions. We are all suffering from attacks on our standard of living and social benefits and the governments proposals on the NHS will just make matters worse than they already were under the Labour government.
The unions may not be our best defenders but we should not let that be a reason to attack each other rather than the ruling elite who are the real beneficiaries of the present economic system.
Comment by Mike on February 29, 2012 at 5:31 pm -
Mike, NHS staff are much better off than the rest of us. Here are some reasons.
1. The NHS workforce has been almost totally protected from job losses compared to the working population as a whole.
2. They have had much better pay rises than most of us in the last decade or so since New Labour started throwing taxpayers money at public sector workers.
3. NHS pensions are generally acknowledged to be utterly superb, and a private sector worker would have to pay about a third of his or her wages into a pension scheme to get the same pesnion and early retirement age. Even the current modest proposed changes to the NHS pension scheme would leave NHS staff on a very generous pension indeed compared to the taxpayers who would continue to subsidise it to a considerable degree.
4. The minimum wage is unknown in the NHS, even for the most menial roles which would attract the minimum wage in the private sector
5. NHS staff generally start on more than the statutory minimum of holidays per year and quickly progresss to quite generous holiday allowances.
It is a measure of just how out of touch many NHS are with the realities of life which affect many people, especially in a working class city like Manchester, that they think that they need to march to tell the rest of us about what a hard time they are having.
Compared to many people, NHS staff are riding out these hard times very easily indeed.
Comment by pete on March 1, 2012 at 11:43 am -
Well job losses have started in the NHS lately (and are rampant alongsides wage cuts in other parts of the public sector) and there are all grades of payment for the vast range of different jobs in the NHS.
Pete’s arguments amount to arguing for the levelling down of wages and conditions – how far they might go in the current recession may depend on the willingness of all workers public or private to fight back – like public sector workers in the NHS or electricians in the private sector are starting to do.
Comment by Mike on March 1, 2012 at 5:35 pm -
While the NHS Bill increases the range of services for which companies, co-ops etc. can bid, it does remove the current bias in favour of private sector commissioning under Labour’s “internal market”, and allows bidding on the basis of quality of care for the patient rather than the current value for money of the commissioning body.
Comment by Dave on March 1, 2012 at 7:07 pm -
Well, I’ll be there and I’m not an NHS worker. I’m an ordinary member of the public with a child with multiple health needs – needs we could not afford to pay for privately and for which she would be uninsurable for private healthcare purposes anyway – private medical insurers only want to insure healthy people!
I’ve had a lot of interaction with NHS workers since she was born and they are NOT, for the most part, generously paid. In terms of value for money, we get a better deal from our health workers than we do from politicians (who we pay far more “generously” from our taxes).
Comment by Jill on March 3, 2012 at 8:21 am -
Well I went along to this as well and met some health workers rightly as angry as me at the implications of this bill but…..
this event seems to have been less about ordinary workers comming out to support each other in fighting the coalition governments austerity measures and more an exercise by Labour Party politicians and their supporters in the UNISON leadership at exploiting that anger to their own opportunist ends.
Bear in mind that it was the last labour government that was just as tied to the interests of corporate capitalism as the current lot and prime movers in a whole raft of measures aimed at the marketisation and privatisation of public services up to and including todays labour councils collusion with central government in cutting local jobs and services.
Comment by Mike on March 4, 2012 at 2:48 pm
The comments are closed.
