Tag: nhs

Here’s Hoping for a Happy New Year!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My final weekly comment column of 2025 in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.12.25) inevitably rounding-up my priorities for the coming year, whilst coldly acknowledging how much more needs to be addressed. No, I haven’t mentioned Your Party, not from any lack of commitment but because this new socialist potential will only succeed by the action it takes to secure the priorities as listed below. If it is yet another organisation created of and for itself, a Party existing in order to simple exist, then it will fail. The point is to raise the socialist banner high and, most importantly, know what we’re fighting for!

Here’s hoping for a Happy New Year!

New Year, whichever and whenever it occurs for you, offers space for reflection as well as projection. The Gregorian calendar fixes ours as 1st January each year, irrespective of the position of the sun or the moon, but close enough to the winter solstice to symbolise new light and fresh beginnings.
New Year is worthy of a wish list, fresh aspirations. In a human world of significant turmoil and uncertainty, so much needs fixing that it’s difficult to prioritise. But here goes. Let’s hope in 2026:

  1. The fascist-led racist movements of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are finally and overwhelmingly defeated by mass mobilisations of working class people outraged by racism and misogyny and challenging the false culture-wars that decry empathy as weakness;
  2. The £13billion a year UK tax-funding for illegal nuclear weapons of indiscriminate mass-destruction is ended, the cash transferred into the National Health Service to fully fund our health and welfare needs rather than warfare. Let’s also ensure an anti-racist campaign in hospitals to value the one-in-three doctors working here from oversees, and encourage our health staff to stay because we value, not abuse, them. Oh, and ensure the NHS is protected from plans to fully privatise our services – the selling of our health records to the private corporation Palantir to be roundly rejected;
  3. An emergency plan for funding to address the housing crisis, including skills apprenticeships for our unemployed young people, for good quality new build of social housing and refurbishment of our 13 million homes in need of repair and insulation, placing rent caps and legal liabilities on private landlords and taxing large landlords to fund the reparations they should have undertaken;
  4. The end of this seemingly endless period of Austerity economics, where workers wages have stagnated since the banking crisis of 2008, our real spending-power actually fallen despite our taxes bailing out the banks without any prosecutions or detriment to the bankers incomes, dividends and bonuses. End the low wage long working hours culture where employers are subsidised by our taxes to keep our wages low. Make the rich pay proportionally the same taxes as the working class instead of being allowed to hide their riches in off-shore accounts;
  5. The acceleration, depth and seriousness of the Climate Crisis is finally accepted and understood, all the lies and denial defeated and replaced by urgent action to end emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, Britain playing a lead role on the international stage to force climate action onto the US Presidency and win funding for the vital transformation of the world economy away from oil and gas and into funded renewable energy delivery North and South. Stop subsidising the oil companies who are reaping record profits from inflated prices causing our fuel poverty;
  6. Child poverty is ended, the 1 in 3 working class kids no longer deprived of some of the basics of life, and our schools refunded under state control;
  7. The genocidal racist Netanyahu is brought to trial and jailed, his far-Right government collapsed. Starmer’s Government support for Zionism and funding of arms to Israel is ended, the protesters against the persecution of Palestinians vindicated and applauded.
    There are so many more issues that must be addressed. Well, we have to live in hope. We are in a period of very fast moving human history, and nothing is impossible. The course of human history has always been determined by the mass movements of working people, not the feeble compromises of the self-promoting political class.
    Best wishes for a campaigning New Year for Peace with Social Justice!
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D-I-Y Life and Death

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (1.4.25), stating the bloody obvious against a barrage of media lies. The NHS has been purposefully demolished by the lobbyists for pharmaceutical big business and private medical profiteers. Imagine people’s health as the source of your wealth. Or rather, personal profiteering from people’s suffering. Who does that? They need challenging, up-front, in their faces.

Full article below:

The National Health Service has long been the focus of political struggle, indeed, ideological warfare. It has represented an island of Socialism in the ocean of Capitalism.
Socialism, a system of human organisation where you give to society what you can afford and get back what you need, is the opposite of individual competition, exploitation of others for your own private wealth, and survival of the fittest.
To have free access to health care at the time of need, paid from the community purse, is a hallmark of collective care and mutuality. Everyone benefits from this universal right.
The political arguments over its future stem from the immense polarisation between rich and poor in our very unequal society. Do you think that wealthy people deserve to get better healthcare than everyone else? If you’re rich you may say so, living in conditions of privilege compared with the majority of humanity, and believing you are entitled to special treatment given you wealth and status.
But most of us think the National Health Service is there to ensure that everyone is treated the same and have their health needs met. We don’t think people should have to pay to see a doctor, and we are scared and appalled by the American healthcare system where treatments cost tens of thousands and medicines are priced according to market demand, costing many times more than in the UK. In the US you pay into a very expensive health insurance, or only receive minimal emergency help in acute need.
Most of us feel very protective of the National Health Service because we know on which side our bread is buttered. UK healthcare is the envy of the American working class despite being in enforced financial crisis. Successive UK governments have held back proportionate funding to create a crisis for which they’ve diagnosed privatisation as the cure. It is, in fact, the cancer eating away the health system’s organs.
The drip-drip take-over has seen ophthalmology, dentistry and podiatry farmed-out to private business ensuring we pay an ever increasing amount for the care in addition to the taxes for healthcare in the first place. Much else of the NHS is divided between the routine treatments and the acute high-cost surgical interventions. The private companies take a cut for their shareholders on the profitable areas of healthcare and pass-over the expensive non-profitable interventions to the public services for the tax-payer to shoulder.
It should be simple to conclude that all services should be inside the NHS, the less-expensive services balancing the budget rather than feeding the private companies. It should be common sense that national control of the private drug companies is essential for the NHS to determine the price of pills rather than the pharmaceutical companies. Get rid of the profiteers and the NHS will cost the tax-payer less.
Last month, Starmer’s privatising government abolished the NHS. There was little fuss. Yesterday they announced a greater role for Chemists – the pharmacies entirely owned by private corporations. The extra £3billion of tax-money to private businesses comes after the closure of thousands of chemist shops, their owners complaining they are not making enough profit from NHS contracts and want to raise the cost of medicines.
It ushers-in the Do-It-Yourself healthcare that tens-of-millions of Americans are condemned to. And it means access to GPs will be further rationed and our universal healthcare finally ended.
Politicians are lobbying for health companies and personally cashing-in on the profits, at our expense. Tory and Labour ministers past and present, including Cameron, Starmer, Streeting and Cooper have declared receipt of huge personal donations from health corporations, with no accountability as to what “favours” are required in return.
The multi-millionaire Nigel Farage, courtier of the privateer, President Donald Trump, has repeatedly stated, “I think we’re going to have to move to an insurance-based healthcare system”. Reform UK is lobbying on behalf of the US pharmaceutical and healthcare companies for the complete take-over of our health services.
Already, because of privatisation, our kids have terrible teeth, our grannies have no nursing care, our taxes are flowing into the coffers of drug companies and charlatan health-and-social-care providers. As always, the poor and the struggling are underwriting the capital wealth and lifestyles of the super rich. The burden falls on the poor.
There’ll be a hell of a lot of people who will die prematurely and in pain as a result of any more restrictions on healthcare and access at the point of need. Perhaps that’s why the government is fast-tracking assisted-dying. Once working class lives are deemed unprofitable we are invalid.

From 1995 – 30 years of Fightback

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Labour Party and union comrade, Mike Sheaff, posted this article from 1995, reviving memories of the long struggle in Plymouth against neoliberalism, privatisation and the break-up of the Welfare State. I moved to Plymouth in 1994 alongside my wife, Sian Gough, and two children. We were already agitational trade union activists, leading activists in Bristol during the Miners Strike, the campaign against the Poll Tax and the campaign against the first Iraq War, and moving to new jobs in Plymouth saw almost no gap in our political work or momentum. It did prove particularly invasive and challenging. the Plymouth Fightback against the Cuts continues today (find us on Facebook!).

Mike wrote (Facebook 14.4.24): This reports a Plymouth meeting held nearly 30 years ago, with speakers including Rachel Silcock, Tony Staunton & my late father. Labour, elected 2 years later, held to Tory spending plans for another 2 years, but did then increase resources, from Sure Start to the NHS. Too much confidence in the private sector, but there were real improvements. I’m not convinced Labour today offers the same possibilities.