Covid-19

Nurses speak out: ‘only joint union action and public support can see us through now

August 26, 2021

Socialist Alternative
Is the NHS facing breaking point?

July 16, 2021

Tom Barker
Cummings lifts lid on deadly Tory failures. Now organise the fight back

May 27, 2021

Connor Rosoman
Socialist Alternative Issue 15 Editorial: Mass struggle looms as lockdown comes to an end

April 30, 2021

Becci Heagney
Tory callousness exposed by infighting – now organise and fight for socialist change

Claire Laker-Mansfield
Open Letter to leaders of health unions and associations: The time for action is now! Coordinate the strikes

March 7, 2021

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Nurses speak out: ‘only joint union action and public support can see us through now

Below, Socialist Alternative carries an interview with two key health union activists, Jac Berry and Holly Turner. Holly is a Learning Disability Nurse, GMB Rep and a leading member of the Facebook group, NHS Workers Say No to Public Sector Pay Freeze. Jac is a Nurse, a member of Unison’s National Executive Committee and has been working on the Intensive Care Unit of her hospital through most of the pandemic. Both were speaking in a personal capacity.

Currently, the major health unions, UNISON, UNITE, GMB, and RCN, along with BMA are balloting their members on the 3% pay offer in a major consultation exercise. Once the result is known, and if members have voted in support of action, a formal strike ballot will follow, most likely towards the end of September

What is the mood in the workplace just now

Holly: Morale has never been lower. The hospital in our Trust was inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) who said staffing levels were dangerously low despite a record number of vacancies. I work in mental health with young people but the CQC closed the hospital to new admissions due to our staffing levels. We are just frustrated, exhausted and demoralised.

Jac: I work across the whole Trust and it is the same here as well. Staff are exhausted, overworked and overwhelmed. We are constantly busy and have not had time to recover from the last two waves. It is really heavy going on the floor and all the staff are ‘done in ‘ and ‘weary’.

What are the immediate priorities for action over pay

Holly: We need the public onside and voicing their support; and we need all the unions to push hard in the workplace. Joint union action and public support can pull us through. We activists are exhausted and have had a difficult task to stay in touch with our members because of Covid restrictions

Jac: Due to intense work pressures, pay is the last thing staff are thinking about. The response so far has been muted but that is because members expect that the union will be able to sort it out. We have not been asked directly by the union to do anything for such a long time. There has also been a big turnover in staff and the NHS is now even more dependent on overseas workers largely from South East Asia or the Caribbean and they usually only plan to stay for 3 years and most do not see the need to be in the union. This is having an impact on the dynamic of the workplace.

Holly: It is now really important that we all get out there and speak to our colleagues because staff are sometimes too busy to read emails. This has to start from the unions. We need leaflets, posters, stalls on the ground and in every ward. Members need to be more aware of the ballot dates and we need to communicate why this is so important. This is not just about Covid, but the last decade of cuts and closures Our fight in reality is to safeguard the future of the NHS for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren.

Jac: The employer is telling staff that the pay deal has been sorted and that we will receive the 3% in next month’s pay packet, backdated for a month. This has to be counteracted with a clear fighting message to vote No. The majority will vote to reject the offer but we will have to work on the turnout. We need a huge vote of opposition.

What should we be demanding of the unions to win the pay claim?

Jac: As Holly has said, we need workplace organising, ward by ward and department by department. We have to get the message out there of needing to reestablish a tradition of struggle. Because everyone is so tired and worn down, the mood needs to be lifted with coordinated and sustained action from the unions.

Holly: We need more cross union working. All the unions must tangibly work with each other. It is frustrating that this has so far not happened. The unions have not coordinated their ballot schedules which would have been so much easier. Members find it confusing when they have not had their ballot paper but another colleague has, just because they are in separate unions. We will need a cohesive plan for working together should we move to a formal strike ballot. There has not been a tradition of collective struggle as Jac has said; we need to go back to the beginning and completely re educate our members about the need for collective action.

Jac: Holly is right, any action needs to be coordinated across unions, involving the largest possible number of workers from across the NHS in a united fight for a restorative pay rise. Hopefully this can be linked up with other public sector workers seeking to break the Tory pay freeze.

Socialist Alternative demands :
- In the event of a No vote in the indicative ballot, for an intensified and coordinated industrial action ballot across all the unions
- For coordinated action between all the health unions in every workplace and every ward
- Mobilise public support through workplace and town centre stalls, local rallies and a huge national demonstration in support of NHS staff
- For an immediate and substantial pay rise across the NHS and Social Care sector.
- Link up the struggle for improved pay across the whole of the public sector, leading to a generalised offensive against the Tories’ pay freeze
Is the NHS facing breaking point?

What does “breaking point” in our NHS actually look like?

After more than a decade of real terms funding cut, it has become normal to hear claims that the NHS has, or is, reaching “breaking point”. Here in my home city, Leicester, we heard reports from back in December 2019 of patients waiting in the back of ambulances for up to six hours because of a lack of capacity. As of November 2019, there were already 4.4million people on the NHS waiting list – a 5.7% increase on the previous year!

Add a pandemic into the mix, and it was always clear that the NHS could crumble.

It has also been common to hear how the NHS is reaching breaking point because of understaffing. Before the pandemic, there was more than 100,000 vacant posts in the NHS, with more than 40,000 of these in nursing. These problems were driven by the hostile environment nurtured by the government; the cuts to the nurses’ bursary; the loss of increments for NHS workers, and the fact that many NHS staff have seen a real-terms pay cut of up to 20% over the last 11 years!

However, the fact that the NHS still exists, despite all these unbearable pressures – the fact that it is still providing services – for some, seems to stand in contradiction to these claims. Indeed, the persistence of the NHS is something which the government has actively tried to claim credit for, in their claims to have “protected the NHS” throughout the pandemic for example.

But breaking point was never going to be a single event, like a ship capsizing. Breaking point was always going to be a process and what we have seen over the last 18 months is a serious acceleration of that process.

Breaking point in the NHS was the many hundreds of NHS workers who died because they did not have access to adequate PPE; breaking point was patients being denied life-saving treatment because of a complete lack of capacity due to decades of cutting beds and selling land. Breaking point is the number of health workers now living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to the experiences of the last year.

In the wider picture, breaking point was the more than 150,000 people now dead due to covid – the highest per capita figure in the world, despite the fact that we are the sixth richest economy in the world!

And how do the government respond to all this? Is it to reward our NHS workers? To pay them what they deserve? No. It is to offer a pathetic 1% pay increase – in reality, a real-terms pay cut – to those who have spent the last year putting themselves in harms way to protect us.

And how do they respond to the structural problems that our NHS has faced, particularly over the last 18 months? Do they plough money into the public sector, which is responsible for both the vaccine and its successful roll out? Again, no! The government responds with more privatisation! The Tories’ new Health and Care Bill, which had its second reading in Parliament on Wednesday, poses a serious danger to the NHS as a public owned organisation. The Bill divides the NHS in England into 42 different ‘integrated care systems’, each with its own tight budget with the principal aim of driving down the costs of health care. While the Bill is promoted as reducing privatisation in the NHS, the reality is the opposite. Private companies are even being allowed to sit on the integrated care system boards in each area – thus partially running the NHS.

And we need to understand the development of this bill in the context of the last 18 months because the purpose of privatisation could not be any clearer. Profits for the few, misery for the many. Just look at the disaster of test and trace: £38 billion squandered on a vitally important service, which should have saved lives! Apparently having learned nothing from this failure, late last month the Tories went ahead and awarded Serco yet another contract, this one worth £322 million, to run more test and trace centres!

But we should be clear that this is not just about incompetence. The government isn’t simply making mistakes when it hands swathes of our services to profiteers, who have no idea and no experience of how to run them. This government’s pandemic response, and its approach to our NHS in general, is dripping in ideology. A decent pay rise for NHS workers would cost a fraction of the money wasted on test and trace. It would also pay for the student nurse bursary more than 50 times over. But this government is not interested in policies which would benefit ordinary people. They are using this pandemic to hand our services over to their mates in the private sector.

A reckoning over this government’s continued mishandling of the pandemic is already overdue. The national day of action on July 3, with protests taking place at 70 different locations across the UK, showed widespread support for NHS workers and opposition to privatisation. We need to build on this momentum.

This means building support in our communities, in our workplaces, in our trade unions, to mobilise people to fight back against this government and this system. Back in January, education workers provided a glimpse of the latent power of organised workers when they forced the government to retreat from their deadly reopening of schools, saving lives in the process. This was a direct result of pressure from below which pushed trade union leaders into action. Similar pressure will need to be mounted on the leaders of health unions when the government does finally announce its pay offer!

To those who say it is no longer possible to maintain the NHS, I say this: 73 years ago, despite a war-ravaged economy with huge debt, we created the world’s first universal health service. This was not handed down to us from on high, like some claim. It was the result of the enormous sacrifices that ordinary working-class people made during the war, and the insistence of these people that the old conditions would no longer be tolerated.

Much is different today, but I think we are living at a similar historic crossroads.

One thing that most people agree on is that we cannot go back to normal… normal was the problem. After all this, we must not allow a return to pay cuts, to underfunding our services, to scapegoating the most vulnerable in society while the billionaires make record profits. We need to build a society where good publicly funded services is a priority. Where zero-hour contracts and fire and re-hire practices are banned. Where workers are not victimised for organising in trade unions. But to get there, we will need to struggle. We know that we have the type of money for this kind of society because the global billionaire class has made out like bandits during this pandemic.

It will be a turbulent road ahead. We will lose some of the battles – but even losses will be important for us as they will sharpen our ability to fight back. We will learn how to fight effectively in the process of struggle.

But fight we must, because there is a future to win!
Cummings lifts lid on deadly Tory failures. Now organise the fight back

Dominic Cummings, the former right-hand man of Boris Johnson, gave evidence to a select committee of MPs on Wednesday around the government’s handling of the early stages of the pandemic in the UK. In doing so, he has shone a light on the carelessness and the callous disregard for people’s lives that has defined Boris Johnson’s government for the past 18 months. In this personal crusade against his old allies, Cummings has blown the lid on a Tory cabinet wracked by internal chaos, but also a stubborn refusal to deal with the reality of a rapidly worsening situation, as the then new coronavirus ran rampant through the country.

This was demonstrated last year in the government’s approach of aiming for “herd immunity” – a strategy that was predicted to lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and one which government ministers, including Health Secretary Matt Hancock, have repeatedly denied supporting. Cummings’ confirmation of this approach, only confirms what many of us already knew, but it also serves as a reminder that after 150,000+ deaths in this country as a result of the pandemic, the blame falls squarely at the government’s feet for the disastrous spread of Covid. The Tories have blood on their hands.

Profit vs health and lives

What Cummings fails to mention is the driving force behind the Tories’ failure to deal with the pandemic. Over the last year, the Tories have consistently taken every opportunity to ensure big business can make a profit. This included outsourcing the NHS track and trace system to infamous corporations such as Serco, with disastrous results, and a reckless premature reopening of the economy. As a result, for all the government’s apparent discussion about avoiding a ‘worse’ second wave in the Winter by allowing a wave of infections in the spring, they totally failed.

This is also one of the core reasons for the deadly delay to the initial lockdown, as well as the second lockdown toward the end of 2020. Cummings makes the point that Johnson had to be pushed into announcing the first lockdown due to the potential economic damage it would do. But he made the mistake not once but twice, delaying the announcement of a second lockdown as Covid rates soared again. As socialists, we understand that the pro-capitalist Tory government is at the whim of the short-sighted interests of capitalist profits. The government only stepped in and introduced the lockdown, as well as state support for businesses, as a last resort to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed to the point of collapse and stave off economic catastrophe.

Shockingly, at the same time as the virus surged, Cummings has revealed that Johnson’s cabinet was preoccupied with plans to join the US in a potential war in the Middle East, putting their imperialist interests ahead of the lives of thousands of working class people in Britain and in Iraq.

It was not just incompetence or ignorance that led to the catastrophe of the last year, although these certainly played a part. But far more crucial was the government prioritising the profits of the capitalist class over the lives of the rest of society. Their drive to maintain, and then to return to, “business as usual”, all the while undercutting the NHS with deals to dodgy corporations, is a fundamental reason for the mishandling of the virus’s spread.

We need a mass, working-class opposition

Cummings’ evidence is a damning indictment of this government, but it would be a mistake to see Cummings as any sort of champion of the working class. Despite his apologies in recent weeks, the central role Cummings played in creating this situation, and his own disregard for his government’s own rules as illustrated in the now-infamous ‘Barnard Castle’ incident will not be lost on ordinary people for whom the effects of the Tories’ long list of failures have been all too real.

It is clear this government has to go – lives depend on it. But we can’t rely on people like Cummings to change things. We need to get organised to build a real fight back and to build a new, mass party of struggle which can offer a real alternative. If you agree with us, get involved!

We say:
- For a fully independent inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic – led by trade unions, health workers and bereaved families
- Save our health service. Fight for a fully funded, publicly owned, democratically run NHS. Kick the privateers out. Nationalise all aspects of health and social care currently in private hands, including track and trace and the pharmaceutical giants, under the democratic control and management of workers
- Courageous health workers deserve a pay rise. Reject the government’s 1% insult. Unions must organise a fight for 15%
- Make solidarity the new normal. The government’s covid failings stem from their prioritising private greed over human need. Fight for a socialist society – based on public ownership of the big monopolies and an economy planned democratically to meet the needs of people and planet

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