The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it

“The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it"

These
words were spoken by then Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan in 1948, as
his dream of creating a National Health Service became a reality. Bevan,
a miner’s son who went on to become a cabinet minister, was not born
into the trappings of privilege; he was motivated to serve the people he
represented: a species that seems to be all but extinct in the
political jungle of today.

Despite the ambitions of Bevan’s
present day counterpart to dismantle a system of which Britain can be
proud, the words of the miner’s son seem to be holding true, considering
the widespread opposition to the implementation of the Health and
Social Care Bill. The Bill is based on government proposals to reform
the NHS, released in in July 2010 as a document titled ‘Equity and
excellence: Liberating the NHS’, more commonly known as the White Paper.

The
proposals, if implemented would allow for changes altering the NHS as
we know it. Though the Tories, predominantly, have claimed that a
radical shake up is needed to improve the NHS and make it more efficient
in a time of austerity, the cat has long since been let out of the bag.

In
addition to giving already busy GPs, who lack the necessary financial
acumen, responsibility for 80% of the NHS budget, something that the
vast majority of GPs are against, the Bill would also leave sections of
the NHS up for grabs, allowing ‘any willing provider’ to bid for
contracts. This means that the NHS would, as in the world of business,
find itself having to compete against private companies and not for
profit organisations (social enterprises) or anyone else eager to get
their hand in the honey pot to bid for services that it currently
operates. An example of how this plays out can be seen in the case where
a local NHS Trust, previously responsible for providing healthcare to
prisoners in several prisons across the North East of England, was
passed over for the contract it previously had, in favour of Care UK, a
private healthcare group, run by John Nash who donated a six figure sum
to the Tory party pre-election.

Opening up the NHS to an
onslaught of snatch and grab companies would cause money to flow out of
the NHS in a method akin to death by a thousand paper cuts.

However,
David Cameron and Andrew Lansley are having to fight on every front.
The GPs, who supposedly Lansley claimed were on his side, have given the
Bill a resounding ‘no’ vote.

Over 90% of surveyed members of the
Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) want the Bill to be
scrapped. President of the RCGP, Clare Gerada, has voiced these concerns
stating "It will turn the National Health Service into thousands of
different health services, all competing for the same patients, the same
knee, the same brain, the same heart.’’

A defeat over this Bill
may prove to be the tidal wave that grinds the Con-Dem anti-public
sector ‘blitzkrieg’ to a halt. Whilst they have rightly been challenged
on other matters- pensions, redundancies, reform of disability
allowance, opposition to academies, and rising unemployment, the
opposition to the implementation of the Health and Social Care Bill has
become a rallying point for opponents of the Con-Dem cuts who have
formed a formidable defence line. Let us hope that the Battle of the
Bill becomes the ‘Stalingrad’ of the coalition government- a defeat that
signals the beginning of the one, that strikes the cabinet of
millionaires with the possibility that ‘no, they are not invincible’,
whilst emboldening all those opposing austerity measures, in any way
shape or form, and showing that the march of austerity is not an
inevitability.

Last week, Cameron was forced to come out
fighting, stating that too much blood has been lost in the battle to
reform the NHS. Do these sentiments of what can be likened to a man
under siege sound familiar to anyone?

With Cameron, Lansley and
their ever dwindling army of allies feeling the isolation biting as they
find themselves ever more surrounded, let’s keep the pressure on: one
final push to liberate the besieged NHS.