Unison Health Conference Backs Action over Pay

At the recent Unison health conference, the largest health union representing over 400,000 members voted to start preparations for a ballot of members to take action against the government’s very provocative and derisory pay offer of 1% to only those on the top of their pay band. Christine McAnea, Unison head of health, said that the recommended 1% is “unfair and deliberately provocative” after “years of below-inflation pay awards”, but for staff in England, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt “has restricted the 1% offer to those at the top of their pay bands” and it will come as a cash sum. Christine McAnea said, “We have to get the message out to members.” She concluded: “Don't do this just for yourself. Do this for patients and for your service as well.” This is a crucial point, highlighting the context of the ballot.

Over a third of non-medical NHS staff are paid below £21,000 and most health service staff have had their pay cut by 8-12% between 2010 and 2013 in real terms. Clare Williams, Unison Regional Convener, said: “Who is being asked to live in austerity? It’s not the growing number of millionaires, which includes most of the cabinet. It’s not the bankers and hedge fund owners and venture capitalists. It is us!”

Over the coming weeks the government and an obedient media will do their best to discredit the NHS staff and their unions over the ballot and days of action. It is important to recognise that the government has carried out this pay provocation as an attack on the very people who are standing up for the NHS against the government's dictate on cuts to our hospitals, privatisation and wrecking of its services. This is why Hunt and Co. are attacking health workers in such a vindictive and divisive way. In taking a stand for their interests, health workers will be standing up for the general interests of society and for the future of the health service in particular. All should unite around their struggle as part of the fight to safeguard the interests of health workers and the future of the NHS. The main points of the motion are given below.

Conference agrees a strike ballot as part of a campaign to:

• create an effective protest against despicable treatment of health staff in 2014;

• seek a commitment from the Westminster government to reinstate full funding of the NHS;

• commit current and future health ministers in all four governments of the UK to reinstate the value of pay lost since 2010; reinstate UK-wide pay scales and reinstate national bargaining structures and Agenda for Change.

50,000 Marching in defence of Stafford Hospital

Today, the fight to safeguard the future of the NHS is a central demand in the fight for the alternative. It is the political demand of the Workers’ Opposition and resistance of the people to defend the right to health care for all. Today, trade unions and whole communities of people are engaged in battles against the all-out privatisation, cuts, attacks on health workers and wrecking by the present Coalition government. The working class movement must play its leading role in this. But also it must keep in mind the whole history of resistance and struggles against successive governments and their privatisation, cuts to services, increased charges such as dental care and long term elderly social and health care, the inroads of the big drug monopolies, prescription charges, the Private Finance Initiative and so on.

In the fight for the alternative the most important question for the working class movement and health workers is not the arguments, and counter arguments, of the big parties in government about what society can, or cannot, “afford” in the provision of health care and all public services. The priority of these big parties is to facilitate the financial oligarchy and monopoly capitalists accumulating the wealth that all produce in society for their interests and projects that attack the people at home and abroad. No, the stand of working class movement is that a modern society today requires modern public services that meet the needs of all, and are recognised as the right of all.

Britain and the developed world is one where the productive forces have become completely socialised and every section of society and every community is dependent on that socialised economy. Such a society requires social relations for that socialised economy that serve the interests of all. In other words, it requires modern arrangements in empowering the whole population to chart the direction for society and its economy. This is the stand of the working class. This stand cannot be confined to narrow aims that whilst opposing the anti-social direction of society do not mobilise the working class and their communities and prepare them for the battles ahead. The issue is how to confront who has power in the society – the people or the monopolies and how to hold the government to account. It is how to bring about that the people have sovereignty vested in them and public right should prevail over monopoly right in society.

At this time, the working class and people's movement is fighting to end the dictate and turn around their exclusion from decision-making and the drive of government to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands.

The government must be held to account, and the workers’ movement must fight that the right to health care be guaranteed. The fight for a change in the direction of the NHS is a necessary battle in the line of march towards bringing into being a new society.

Public consultations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a so-called free trade agreement between the EU and the US, have been taking place for the past month, focusing specifically on what it calls “investment protection” and Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). The consultations began on March 27, following their announcement by EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht earlier this year on January 21.

The aim of this agreement is to remove restrictions on the monopolies against the interests of the people, through new regulatory arrangements that suit their narrow interests, including the liberalisation of state-run services and the direct and indirect privatisation of social programmes. The agreement is a reflection of the ever-growing demand of the monopolies that their assumed rights be the only determining factor. The section on ISDS in particular is to set up international arrangements where monopolies can challenge states. It would allow US companies investing in the EU to directly challenge EU governments at private international tribunals, and vice-versa. Originally shrouded in secrecy, this proposal has been described as a corporate bill of rights.

The consultation was announced following the exposure of and subsequent opposition to ISDS. This consultation is itself being carried out to further the disinformation and steer discussion away from the central issue. The European Commission stated on March 27 that it “felt it was necessary to launch this particular public consultation as a response to the growing public debate... While the current public debate is very welcome and important, there have been a number of misconceptions and even misrepresentations as to the aims of ISDS within TTIP negotiations.”

In other words, the European Commission seeks to use the consultation to manage the public debate. Not only is the consultation to be used for public relations and to present the Commission as listening to the European public, but also to ensure the agenda of discussion is around their terms.

The European Commission explained at the time the consultation was first announced that the decision “reflects the Commissioner’s determination to secure the right balance between protecting European investment interests and upholding governments’ right to regulate in the public interest”.

To present such a dichotomy and argue that a “balance” must be found is an established neo-liberal method of dressing an attack on the rights and claims of the people as something necessary and reasonable. It hides the clash between conditions and authority. The argument here is reminiscent of the notorious argument used in Britain, the US and in Europe to push through so-called anti-terror legislation – that a balance or trade-off exists between civil liberties and security. The result in that case has been to deny the right to conscience and to criminalise dissent. In the present case, it is being used to divert attention from an encroaching of monopoly right over public right.

The consultation seeks to direct the debate around this line of balance, and so completely disorient the opposition. This notion must be rejected. Instead, people have to take a stand that monopoly right should be restricted and public right defended. The aim of the European Commission in holding its consultation is to ensure that its perspective holds sway. Rather, people have to organise for their own perspective to hold sway. They have to find ways of making sure that the debate takes place around the line of defending public right and restricting monopoly right.

The Coalition government has been a staunch supporter of TTIP, illustrated by the evident enthusiasm of Trade and Investment Minister Lord Livingston, who on March 21 said: “TTIP has the potential to be the biggest bilateral deal ever... Greater co-operation on regulatory issues, better recognition of professional qualifications and simpler visa requirements are just some of the potential benefits of TTIP for British and US firms.”

Furthermore, when the TTIP was recently debated in parliament, it was met with almost unanimous approval from all three big parties, underlining the need for people to oppose the whole consensus that exists in parliament. To oppose this all-round commitment to monopoly right and to instead uphold public right, people must demand that the agreement be rejected in full and create their own mechanisms that develop discussion with their own perspective that will enable them to put forward an alternative to the Europe and North America of the monopolies.

In the period before 1914, the Labour Party, along with the other social-democratic parties of Europe, had pledged to oppose an inter-imperialist war between the big powers. It had adhered to the resolution, re-adopted at the Basle Congress of the Second International in 1912, that all such parties “should use every effort to prevent war by all the means which seem to them most appropriate”. In the event of war, “it was their duty to intervene in favour of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilise the political and economic crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule”. The Basle Congress placed particular emphasis on the actions of the workers of Britain, France and Germany to prevent the governments of these countries from launching an inter-imperialist war.

However, as soon as war was declared the Labour Party and TUC leaders declared “that an immediate effort be made to terminate all existing disputes…and, wherever new points of difficulty arise during the war a serious attempt should be made by all concerned to reach an amicable settlement…” They declared their support for the predatory war, supported mass recruitment, and created the conditions for the government to declare strikes and other trade union activities illegal in many industries for the duration of the war, and for the introduction of the draconian Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), which made active opposition to the war a criminal offence. In 1915, leading members of the Labour Party joined the warmongering coalition government. European socialist parties of the Second International had sunk to the ignominious level of supporting their own imperialist powers in the slaughter of World War One.

Unity with the exploiters was justified as “defence of the fatherland,” the need for national unity in the time of war and other chauvinistic phrases. The most far-sighted revolutionary thinkers of the time therefore concluded that such parties were no longer organisations that could advance the interests of the mass of the workers and posed the question as to what kind of party was required.

This experience of the First World War demonstrates the need also today to never be reconciled with the warmongering of the big powers, particularly that of the British ruling class which continues in its pursuit of its imperialist interests, no matter what “humanitarian” or even “revolutionary” phrases it cloaks them in. The experience of the First World War showed that the workers of Britain and other countries must organise themselves, based on their own independent programme in order to play a leading role in the anti-war movement. Such a programme necessitates the workers organising with the perspective of creating their own anti-war government, building the proletarian front to bring this about, and settling scores with all pretexts for the betrayal of their interests.