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Labour Conference: Last chance to save the NHS

Horror stories told at my surgery are a sign of just how vital it is for Labour to win in 2015, says JON TRICKETT

There are 225 days until the biggest fight of our lives — the general election. 

It will be a fight for our values, for the labour movement and beyond.

It will not be easy — but not only can we win in May 2015. We must.

We must win in order to change our country for the better. But also we must win to save our NHS.

Mark my words — if the Tories win you can say goodbye to the NHS as we know it. 

They continue to cut away at the NHS financially, they undermine the morale and hard work of staff and they are poisoning our healthcare system with unscrupulous privatisation week by week.  

Over the summer Andy Burnham stated that “NHS privatisation is now proceeding at pace and scale as commissioners are forced to put services out to the market. For the first time, NHS spending on private and other providers has just broken through the £10 billion barrier.”

The Tories are not doing this to clear the deficit, as they claim, nor are they just cutting waste, as they promised. Rather, they are systematically undermining the founding principles of universal healthcare because they simply do not believe in it.

Leading Tories are known to believe that the NHS is a 65-year-old failed experiment.

But it is their experiment that is failing.

In July this year I heard some awful stories in one of my surgeries.  

Firstly, I met the family of a cancer sufferer. As a result of the condition she fell, damaged her leg and had to go to A&E. The X-ray confirmed that the leg was broken. But when she told them she had terminal cancer, the nurse then asked her if there was any point in treating the broken leg. 

And then a man told me that his wife realised that she was suffering from a stroke and had seen the TV adverts which say that speed is of the essence in such cases.

So they jumped in the car and sped off to the local A&E. When they got there they told the reception that she was having a stroke. They were then put into a queue where they were made to wait for 50 minutes before they were seen — 50 minutes which could have proved fatal or at least led to lasting and irreparable damage.

Lastly, I met a young woman whose husband had been diagnosed as suffering from terminal cancer of the prostate. The hospital had known for months that he was at risk as a result of tests which showed elevated levels of PSA in his urine.

But there is a shortage of MRI scanners. So he waited months for an MRI scan which would have immediately diagnosed his cancer. By the time that the scan was carried out the cancer had migrated across into his bones and other vital organs.

Now I don’t tell these stories to denigrate the NHS or its staff.

It is always possible for a staff member to make a tragic mistake. But so many mistakes in one morning surgery? I don’t think so. 

I was first elected to represent the Labour Party in 1984 and I have never before encountered such a catalogue of problems 

No. Something is going badly wrong.

The government want you to believe that there is something about the structure and character of the NHS itself which is at fault.

And there we have it. For the reverse is the case. What is actually going wrong is that the Tories want to destroy the basic principles of the NHS.

And it’s not difficult to see why they want to destroy it. The reason is that the very culture of the NHS stands as a statement of our values rather than theirs. 

These values are that medical treatment is universally available to all. And what will determine the nature of your treatment, as well as the speed of your treatment, is not the size of your wallet but the scale of the medical problem which you are facing.

The NHS is for the millions and not just for the millionaires. 

The Conservatives, by contrast, want to build a society which is for the 1 per cent and not for the other 99 per cent. So the speed of your treatment depends on your ability to pay.

There are still people who remember the health service before the NHS. They can tell you what happens when private medicine is dominant. On the Labour Party website  you will find stories about those times. The NHS is the single greatest achievement of our movement. The core values of the NHS are abiding socialist values and they stand in direct rebuke to all that the Conservatives want to achieve in office.

They will destroy our health service if they can. And so we must never forget what Aneurin Bevan said – that there will always be an NHS as long as there are people ready to fight for it.

And this is why we must win the next election. 

 

But it will be tough. We are up against the big money of the Tory Party who are raising a staggering £100,000 a day. Every day.

David Cameron will have a war chest of £30 million with which to fight his election.

And who are the people who are paying into this fighting fund? They are hedge-fund managers, investment bankers and Russian oligarchs. But there are also people linked to private healthcare companies which are likely to make a killing out of the Tories’ NHS sell-off.

Some 61 Tory MPs have either received donations from private health companies or have shares and interests in private health. 

Circle Health and Care UK have won contracts from the NHS worth £1.36 billion and £102.6 million respectively — these two companies are linked to £3.3 million in Tory donations. 

David Cameron and his cronies may have a pile of money but what our movement has cannot be matched by the Tories.

We have a National Health Service whose values correspond to those of the British people. 

Thousands of nurses, doctors, midwives and hospital staff working tirelessly every day to save lives. 

And we have people — like the women who marched from Jarrow to London this summer in the People’s March for the NHS — who lit a spark for our health service. We must turn that spark into a flame which illuminates what the Tories are doing to our health service.

Those women had the right idea. We need a movement built from the bottom up which is based on the labour movement but which extends way beyond our organisations.

Only together can we win the battle against the Tories.

Last year was the 65th anniversary of the NHS and we can see another 65 years of our public health service free at the point of need by defeating the Tories in May 2015. 

If a Labour government gets into office it will abolish this pernicious Tory NHS legislation and end the drive to more competition in our health service. 

The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. 

 

Jon Trickett is MP for Hemsworth in Yorkshire. Twitter: @jon_trickett  Facebook.com/jon.trickett  Website: www.jontrickett.org.uk

 

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