Tuesday 14 August 2007

No to foundation trust status!

The North East Essex Mental Health Branch of Unison has agreed to resist and campaign against plans by the North East Essex Mental Health Trust to form a foundation trust, on the grounds that this will put profit before people and take the running of the hospital out of government hands.

The foundation hospital scheme, promoted by Patricia Hewitt and first proposed by Alan Milburn with Tony Blair’s blessing, makes NHS trusts independent and in competition with one another.

As health minister, Hewitt subjected the NHS to marketisation and New Labour’s obsession with targets. The foundation hospital scheme goes even further, in effect breaking up the NHS and putting it in the hands of private marketeers and capitalist investors.

These profiteers – including British and foreign contractors - have already milked the NHS of billions in public money, thanks to their friends in New Labour.

Drastic cutbacks in spending after Hewitt introduced NHS internal market pricing last year have already led to the closures of mental health facilities in Essex, at Kitwood and at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, apart from ward closures and the sacking of thousands of nurses up and down the country.

In fact the North East Essex Mental Health Trust still has to resolve its own financial problems before it can apply for foundation trust status.

The branch also considered racist attacks on nurses by mental health patients over a two year period within the Trust, and has commissioned solicitors to investigate the attacks in which many of the trust’s black nurses suffered racial abuse.

The branch also re-affirmed its commitment to continue campaigning against racism and the BNP.

The branch has also sent £50 to social care staff in Glasgow who are on an indefinite strike against Glasgow City Council in a pay dispute. The strike has already lasted three weeks.

There is already widespread anger amongst nurses and other NHS staff over the government’s latest paltry pay increase offer of 2.5 per cent.

Monday 13 August 2007

The New Communist Party’s electoral policy

The NCP’s electoral policy calls on supporters to vote Labour in all elections, while boycotting European elections (this is because we do not regard the governing bodies of the EU as democratically representative).

Our call to vote Labour is not because we support the right-wing policies of New Labour, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, or because we think a Labour government can solve the problems of working people - that is not possible in a capitalist 'democracy'.

A Labour government is simply the best possible outcome in the current political circumstances, in which Britain is governed through a bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

In our view a Labour government, with the organisational links connecting the Labour Party, trade unions and the Labour movement, offers the best option for the working class currently available. This is why the right wing and their supporters in the capitalist media have made so many attempts to break the Labour Party’s links with trade unions.

We believe that alternative electoral policies to achieve a leftist or socialist government are nothing more than a mirage. The only realistically possible alternative governments would involve Tories or Liberal Democrats and would be more anti-working class than a Labour government.

We believe there have been gains since 1997 which would not have happened under the Tories, including the peace process in Ireland, improved terms and conditions for workers, reduced child poverty, the restoration of the Greater London Authority, and the GLA’s successes under Ken Livingstone.

The removal of Tony Blair to some extent reflects the pressures from Labour Party members and the labour movement to end the war in Iraq, end privatisation and PFI and tackle the obscene inequalities in wealth distribution.

Of course these goals are far from being achieved with the installation of a Gordon Brown government, but the labour movement can still have greater influence than it would under a Tory or Lib Dem regime.

Our electoral policy does not represent our ultimate goals for the working class in Britain. Solving the problems of working people, and ending Britain’s imperialist role in the world, in our view can only come about through a socialist revolution, and putting the working class in power.