One Hundred Thousand Demonstrate in England, Scotland and the north of Ireland against Austerity

London

Glasgow

Around one hundred thousand people protested on October 18 in London, Glasgow and Belfast against the low pay economy and the austerity agenda. Many of those protesting were public sector workers such as teachers and nurses opposed to a below-inflation 1% pay offer from the government. This was a massive turnout representing the anger of working people against the anti-social offensive and their determination that the situation must be turned around. It reflects the necessity to build the Workers’ Opposition to decision-making being in the hands of the monopolies and the ruling elite and the necessity to overcome the exclusion of the working class from decision-making.

For the statement distributed by RCPB(ML), see [wwie32].

Frances O'Grady, TUC general secretary The massive turnout would send a strong message to Downing Street, TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said. For more on her speech to the rally, see the short video below.

Public sector workers including teachers, nurses, civil servants and hospital workers were among those taking part in the protests, alongside rail and postal workers and others from private firms. The marches followed public sector strikes earlier this week. Midwives went on strike for the first time in their history in protest at the government’s unjust decision not to pay a recommended 1% increase to all NHS staff. Hospital radiographers and prison officers were to take strike action in the coming week over the same dispute.

Around 500 Welsh trade unionists travelled on a special train from Cardiff and Newport to join the march and rally in London.

On the train was Martin Mansfield, general secretary of the Wales TUC, who said: “We are into a ‘zombie’ recession where we are told by the UK government that the economy is growing and unemployment going down, while the great majority of people are not enjoying the benefits of statistical growth and an increasing number are working in low paid, part-time jobs that sometimes have zero hours contracts. What we need is real growth where ordinary people have more money to spend, not just the tiny minority at the top of society.”

“The average worker is £50 a week worse off than in
2007 and five million earn less than the living wage.
Meanwhile, top directors now earn 175 times more
than the average worker,” Frances O’Grady said
Also on the train was Ken Daniels, who heads the GMB union branch at Cardiff Council, representing nearly 4,000 workers. He said, “The situation in local government is worse than it’s ever been in the many years that I have been a union rep. The latest round of cuts recently announced risks destroying council services as we know them and will result in many people losing their jobs.”

Hundreds of workers from across Birmingham and the West Midlands came to London in several coachloads of members. The Unite union took at least 400 Birmingham members to the protest. Regional secretary Gerard Coyne said: “The government say that Britain is on the mend, Britain is on the up, but the reality is that the people at the bottom can’t feel it, in fact 51 per cent feel like it’s getting worse.”

The TUC, which organised the protests under the slogan “Britain Needs a Pay Rise”, said between 80,000 and 90,000 people had taken part in the London march from the Embankment, through central London, to the rally in Hyde Park.

Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, said that the best thing the government could do was recognise the value of the masses of people here today who have suffered and give them a pay rise. He said, “Our members didn’t cause this recession, our members didn’t cause the failures of the banks.”

GMB union general secretary Paul Kenny said members’ living standards were still falling. “People are currently facing the biggest squeeze on their incomes since Victorian times, and wages have fallen in real terms every year since 2010,” he said.

Thousands of workers took part in a rally in Glasgow, calling for an end to austerity and to highlight the need for pay to increase. Public sector workers including teachers, nurses, civil servants and hospital cleaners marched alongside railway workers, postmen and others from private firms. Glasgow's event was called “A Just Scotland” with the STUC saying that irrespective of views on the referendum “it’s time to create a just Scotland”.

Thousands of people also gathered in the centre of Belfast for a march and rally to protest over low pay rises for public sector workers.

The event at Donegall Street was organised by the Northern Ireland committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU). The ICTU estimated that 1,500 people took part in the Belfast march. The NI Committee of the ICTU said that a quarter of the region’s working population are paid less than the living wage, which is currently £7.65 per hour.

There was a strong contingent of nurses and midwives who were protesting at the government’s controversial decision not to pay a recommended 1% increase to all NHS staff. Colleen Hamilton, a nurse at Altnagelvin Hospital said, “I work as a full-time nurse and I just feel that the idea of us not getting our one per cent pay rise as promised from government is a wee bit ridiculous. Every other public sector worker has received their pay rise but NHS staff haven’t. I believe in strength in numbers because it’s really important for all nursing staff, all healthcare workers to get together to prove to people that we need this pay rise. As the cost of living and inflation increases every year, our pay has been the same since 2010.”

Bill McClinton, from trade union GMB said, “The message from the rally today is there is a need and an urgent need to pay some attention to the levels of pay that are being awarded across the economy. Increasingly, our members are coming to us and their issue is their levels of pay, they are struggling to pay basic things, like rent and electricity. The average worker working in local government, earns between £12-19,000 a year. About two-thirds of those people are women, many of them are part time and in many instances that wage is essentially the family wage which is not going to one single person but a family.”

Film Impression of the demonstration - Build the Workers’ Opposition!
Produced by RCPB(ML)

October 18, demonstration through London The chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, has presented the government with a five-year plan which he claims would relieve the pressure on hospitals and GP practices and provide patients with better care.

“We have no choice but to do this. If we do it a better NHS is possible,” he told The Guardian. “If we don’t the consequences for patients will be severe.” An extra £8bn on top of the NHS England’s £100bn budget will be required by 2020 to fund the plan, known as the Five Year Forward View. It will also require the full support of future governments to be successful, Simon Stevens warned. He said the NHS was now at a “crossroads”, and the country needed to decide “which way to go”.

The plan was drawn up by Simon Stevens in partnership with five other national bodies: Public Health England, the regulator Monitor, the NHS Trust Development Agency, Care Quality Commission and Health Education England.

In the House of Commons on October 23, Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt, in answer to an Urgent Question put by Andy Burnham, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health, said that the report “recognises the real challenges facing the NHS, but it is essentially positive and optimistic. It says that continuing with a comprehensive tax-funded NHS is intrinsically do-able, and that there are ‘viable options for sustaining and improving the NHS over the next five years’.”

This is not to put a forward-looking view on the viability of the NHS, but is an archaic rendering of the requirements of meeting the claims of the population for health care provided as of right by the government as the representative of society. In particular, it puts the onus on the claims of the government on the social product through taxation to fund the right of the people to health care. It lets the monopolies, who benefit from the wealth created by a healthy workforce, off the hook.

There is much scaremongering over the funding of the NHS. The government is not averse to increasing funding for the NHS provided it serves its neo-liberal agenda of privatisation and monopoly right, just as it is not averse to providing funding for its pro-war agenda. The scaremongering is designed to underpin this agenda, and blame the people and health care workers for the crisis in the NHS. It is also designed to spread disinformation over the fact that the health service adds value to the socialised economy and to all of society.

Thus, when Jeremy Hunt comments on the report’s statement that “decisions on these options will need to be taken in the context of how the UK economy overall is performing” by saying, “In other words, a strong NHS needs a strong economy,” he is putting the cart before the horse. In fact, a strong economy, geared towards benefiting working people, needs a strong NHS, in which health care is recognised as a right.

Health workers' strike, October 13, Birmingham However, the report goes far beyond this issue of funding. As Jeremy Hunt said, it “proposes detailed new models of care, putting out-of-hospital services front and centre of the solution, delivered through greater integration between primary, community and specialised tertiary sectors alongside national urgent and emergency networks. These can help to reduce demand significantly for hospital services and give older people in particular the personal care that we would all want for our own parents and grandparents.”

It is very necessary to be vigilant about this agenda of integrating social care and health care. In itself, it sounds very just, since it is a scandal that social care is not funded in the same way as health care, and that social care itself is in crisis. Yet it has to be measured against the reality. The just-sounding proposals may remain policy objectives, while the actual measures taken are likely to be the ones connected with the closing and running down of hospitals, while the increasing onus on GP surgeries remain pie-in-the-sky as the crisis in training and recruiting GPs intensifies. The perspective that GP surgeries can become “mini-hospitals” thus can represent what is in fact the worst of both worlds – neither properly functioning hospitals nor properly functioning surgeries. Of course, the way the government intends to square this circle is actually to intensify the direction of putting both health and social care under the direction of the health monopolies and their spin-off advisory bodies.

The government cries crocodile tears over the quality of care in society and in the NHS, for instance Jeremy Hunt cites the report as talking about “reducing variation in the quality of care, in the wake of the tragedy in Mid Staffs, and about how the new Care Quality Commission inspection regime is designed to drive up standards across the system. It says that to do this we will need to move to much greater transparency in outcomes across the health and social care system. Finally, the report makes important points about better integrating the public health agenda into broader NHS activity, with a particular focus on continued reductions in smoking and obesity rates.”

But it refuses to accept its responsibility for health care through NHS England as a public good. Instead it promotes the conception that the problems in the NHS are not of its making, but lie either with allegedly uncaring health workers or are the fault of the population for either not looking after themselves or for simply growing older.

The question is indeed what is the direction of travel needed for the NHS. When Andy Burnham in reply said, “what clearer illustration could there be of the serious loss of public accountability arising from the Government’s reorganisation?” he touches on a serious issue at the heart of the matter. But he does not question the “direction of travel”, because, as the Shadow Secretary of State says, “the report endorses Labour’s vision for new models of care, including hospitals evolving into integrated care organisations with more salaried GPs”.

The change of direction in NHS England which is required is to detach it from the neo-liberal agenda and capital-centred thinking and requirements, and declare that health care is a right which the government is duty-bound to guarantee. The marginalisation of the people from decision-making has to be reversed, and health workers and professionals genuinely be empowered to participate in setting the agenda for the health service and having a decisive say in its running. Crucially, the fight must be carried forward for the people as a whole to be empowered to decide the direction of the health service and of society.

For a Change in Direction of NHS England and of Society!
For a Human-Centred Health Service and Society!
Demand that the Government Recognises Health Care as a Right!