To get the perspective of the NHS reforms from a
healthcare worker, Socialist.net talked to Martin Booth, Chair of the Unison health branch
at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge and Secretary of the Cambridgeshire
Against the Cuts campaign.
The creation of the National Health Service is considered
by many people to be the greatest achievement of any British government. The
NHS was established in 1948 on the back of a landslide victory by the Labour
Party in 1945, who came to power on a programme that included the creation of
the cradle-to-grave welfare state, the mass construction of council housing,
and the nationalisation of transport and key industries. Aneurin Bevan, the
Labour Minister of Health who pushed for the creation of the NHS, famously said
that, “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight
for it.” Now these words are being put to the test as the coalition government
seeks to introduce the most regressive changes to the NHS in its history.
On Tuesday
May 25, the US imposed penalties against Venezuelan state-owned company
PDVSA, and another 6 companies from other countries, for conducting
business with Iran. The sanctions are part of an attempt by Washington
to step up the pressure against Iran in relation to its nuclear program.
They are also an act of blatant bullying directed against Venezuela.
The last few
weeks have seen an unprecedented public dispute between the president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader Ali Khamenei. The dispute
officially erupted over Ahmadinejad’s dismissal of Heydar Moslehi, the
minister of intelligence who was fired by Ahmadinejad (officially he
resigned himself) on April 17, but was then reinstated later the same
day by a direct decree from Khamenei.
Options
are starting to run out for the Irish ruling class, already this week
they have deployed Jedward, Jack Charlton and the British Queen, while
Obama is waiting in the wings. Sooner
or later Bono and Geldof will appear and then it’ll be back to normal,
maybe they’ll even take the seals off the post boxes. Normal of course
is the IMF/EU, the Croke Park agreement and trying to reduce the
interest rates on the bailout.
It leaps across frontier,
defying all barriers, it laughs at the threats and curses of the ruling
class and it sweeps aside the forces of the state. It cannot be halted.
The mass protests that are spreading from one country to another have
caught all the forces of the old society by surprise. They do not know
how to react. If they do nothing, the movement grows, but if they
attempt to crush it, it will grow much more rapidly.
Latin American activists and supporters of the Bolivarian struggle gathered together in London on Saturday for this year’s HOV conference.
First it was
Tunis, then Cairo, then Wisconsin, and now Spain. The crisis of
capitalism has set in motion a tsunami that is impossible to control.
All the representatives of the old order have combined to halt it:
politicians and police, judges and trade union bureaucrats, the hired
press and the television, priests and “intellectuals”. But the tsunami
of revolt rolls on from one country to another, from one continent to
another.
If anyone was under any illusion that the mere detail of a
general election would have made any difference to the prospects for the
Irish economy and for unemployment in the state then by now their
illusions will have been severely tested.
How the
mighty have fallen! Whatever the truth of the allegations of sexual
assault and rape brought against him in New York, Dominique Strauss-Kahn
is guilty of horrific crimes. As the head of the IMF, he is guilty of
the political rape of the working people and the poorest sections of
society in many underdeveloped countries. He is guilty of the rape of
Greece and Portugal. Before finding himself in prison, he contributed to
locking millions of people into a living hell. His brutal “remedies”
inflict suffering and hardship on the poor in order to protect the
interests of the bankers, the capitalists, the rich.
The Walton by-election, in Liverpool,
took place in July 1991, twenty years ago. It arose after the sudden
death of Eric Heffer, the left-wing Labour MP for Walton. At the time it
created quite a political stir. It was also a key factor in the demise
of the Militant, which had boasted it could win the seat, but
failed miserably.