Before the
establishment of the NHS in 1948, the provision of health care was inextricably
bound up with religion and controlling the poor. What is clear is that
capitalism has never been able to provide health care for working people and
they have been forced to rely on charity and philanthropy.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the
National Health Service, once described by Tony Benn as the “the most socialist
and most popular” of all institutions in the UK. Supported even by a majority
of Tory voters over the years, ardent supporters of privatisation such as
Margaret Thatcher, was obliged to assure voters that “The NHS is safe in our
hands!”
In 1976 the Lucas Aerospace Company was faced with the
prospect of making up to 20% of its 18,000 workers redundant. Lucas was a big
conglomerate that had just come into existence, partly with the support of the
1974-79 Labour government’s industrial policy. They wanted to create ‘national
champions’ and thought ‘big is beautiful.’ Not if you’re going to lose your job
as a result, it isn’t!
This
new book by Alan Woods is a polemic against a well-known (in Latin American
terms) intellectual Heinz Dieterich. Dieterich claims to have invented a new
"Socialism of the 21st Century" and much else into the bargain. He offers a
great deal of advice to those involved in the Venezuelan Revolution dressed up
in all manner of revolutionary rhetoric. However, when you clear away all the
verbiage that surrounds his "new" socialist philosophy, there remains
nothing new at all, simply a rehash of stale petty-bourgeois ideas of the past.
Months
after Branch Secretary Michael Gavan was sacked from Newham Council, after he
was victimised for undertaking trade union activities, the left have taken
control of the branch. This is an indication of the way things are moving.
Hedge funds are in the news again. They don’t much
like being in the public gaze. We wonder why. Does their speculation cause
prices to go up? Do they drive firms into bankruptcy so workers lose their jobs?
These are the questions being asked. Let’s see what they get up to.
The cleaners on London Underground are taking strike action
for a decent standard of living. Successful 24 hour action on the 26th of June
was followed by a 48 hour strike starting on the 1st of July. The organising Union, the RMT, has reported that there was
widespread bullying of the strikers. Bob Crow said, “Reports coming in from the
picket lines over the last 36 hours indicate that the employers are so
desperate that they are resorting to gangster-style intimidation and using the
worst sort of fear attacks to stop more people joining the strike.
Unite’s Graham Tran
comments, “There was recently a case where a young man was given a 24 month
prison sentence for spraying graffiti on train carriages. When Shell was
prosecuted following the deaths of two workers on Brent Bravo, they pleaded
guilty and got a fine of £90,000. That is the equivalent of the profit they
make in 45 minutes. A two year sentence for spraying paint on trains – 45
minutes for killing two men.”
For 30 years it has been illegal to sack a worker for
his or union activities and it is commonly thought that blacklisting is also
against the law. It was included in the 1999 Employment Relations Act, but in a
discreet U-turn the government never formally brought in regulations to bring
it to the statute book. Technically it remains legal.
Pressures
have been building up in British society. High house prices, fuel and food
price increases and pay restraint and cuts particularly in the public sector
are all having a huge effect on workers. It’s obvious that there’s going to be
a change and the longer it is delayed the worse the storm is when it eventually
breaks.
Many of those living in Aberdeen and
the surrounding area were woken up by the sound of helicopters flying over
their houses, flying to the largest offshore oil piping disaster that the world
has ever seen. The crew of the Piper Alpha platform consisted of 230 men. Only
63 were to make it out of the Piper that night. This article is a tribute to
those who never managed to get out due to the negligence of their employers.