In 2009, the Labour Government launched its ‘Transforming Community Services’ policy for public healthcare. PCT boards were instructed to evaluate their provider services and consider a variety of models for future service delivery. One model much favoured by the current coalition Government is social enterprise, defined as ‘businesses established to address a social or environmental need’.
Time is running out for the NHS, after the government’s reform bill passed the House of Lords first reading in October. The plans are strongly opposed by NHS workers, including doctors and nurses. The proposed law will replace Primary Care Trusts with commissioning bodies, opening the way for wholesale privatisation.
Today saw the start of the Royal College of GPs conference in Liverpool. Keep Our NHS Public held a protest outside the venue, the BT Convention Centre, as health minister Andrew Lansley was set to be the day's keynote speaker. Members of Liverpool Solidarity Federation joined the action.
As the land was private property, the security had taken the trouble to set up a protest pen using steel barricades, in which the demonstrators were to be contained. Liverpool Solfed members and others were resistant to this, but too many of those who turned up complied willingly either by going inside or by keeping their distance from the centre whilst giving out leaflets. The minority who chose not to be caged - especially as there were no police present! - simply kept moving about so that they were never static enough to be herded back to the pen.
The Cabinet Office has reportedly been carrying out ‘war games’ to prepare for possible strike action against sweeping cut backs. Plans have centred on ensuring there’s enough scab labour available to break strikes in key sectors.
Ministers have already suggested they will tighten Britain’s already draconian anti-strike laws in the event significant strike action breaks out. A string of recent strike ballots have been ruled unlawful in the courts, using technicalities to annul majority votes for action. Both Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne have threated to further tighten the law “as a last resort” if union bosses don’t co-operate.
Merseyside protest at planned plant closure
Workers and supporters at the Burton’s biscuits factory in Moreton have marched against plans to close the plant.
In his 1992 book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Noam Chomsky attributed the role of the US administration in its interventions in places like El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua in part to the desire to negate the ‘threat of a good example’.
He argued that these countries were showing their neighbours that ownership of the means of production could be retained within the country rather than handed over to US multinationals, and that it was possible to run a country reasonably successfully without it being a de facto colony of the US. Such ‘good examples’ had to be crushed as soon as possible, lest the lesson should spread. Various methods have been used in pursuit of this purpose over the years, from ‘agent orange’ in chemical weapons used in Vietnam to the backing of violent coups by US henchmen such as Pinochet and the bloodthirsty Nicaraguan ‘Contras’. They have, by and large, been successful.
Sixty years after its birth, the process of auctioning off the most profitable sections of the NHS is now well and truly underway. GPs who have traditionally run their own small, locally-based surgeries are now being forced to compete with huge international companies as a result of legislative changes introduced in 2003.
Primary Care Trusts who manage and oversee local healthcare budgets are increasingly being swayed by a new Alternative Provider of Medical Services (APMS) contract model which enables GP surgeries to be sold off to big profit-making companies like Virgin, Boots and the US corporation, United Healthcare Europe. The latter body is the British section of the largest healthcare provider in the United States – which is under investigation there for allegedly using subsidiary company Ingenix to defraud patients by manipulating benefits below the usual costs.
In 2009, the Labour Government launched its ‘Transforming Community Services’ policy for public healthcare. PCT boards were instructed to evaluate their provider services and consider a variety of models for future service delivery. One model much favoured by the current coalition Government is social enterprise, defined as ‘businesses established to address a social or environmental need’. 
