Oldham trades council held a public meeting on Friday 9th September to discuss how to campaign against cuts to the NHS budget and against the (so-called) Health Reform Bill. Since Oldham is a political desert, with almost no political activity going on outside of general elections, this was a significant event in itself. 

The meeting was chaired by Mark Larkin of Oldham TUC, with a union representative from Unite and from Unison and both local Members of Parliament as invited speakers. After each had made a ten minute speech, contributions were invited from the audience.

Health service staff talked about patients already being denied some types of NHS treatment because the criteria for deciding whether a patient is suitable for treatment is being manipulated so as to ration some procedures. Cataract operations are being subjected to rationing. Debbie Abrams MP gave the example of a local man aged 33 who is unable to work because cataracts have impaired his sight too much and he is in a precision engineering job which requires acute vision. he can no longer work but has been told that cataract operations are only available to people who are completely blind or almost so. If he has to wait until his visual impairment is that far advanced, he will not only not be able to work but will need carers as well. But that cost comes out of social services budgets, not the NHS.

Some people, out of desperation, are paying privately for treatment at the same hospitals that denied them treatment on the NHS.

Most of the discussion concerned the Health 'Reform' Bill which has just been through all its House of Commons stages and will shortly be looked at in the House of Lords. The Health Secretary's claim that he had 'paused' the Bill to take account of objections was false. All the amendments made to the Bill since then have left it in much the same form. For example, the clause that said Monitor (the quango which is to oversee the NHS budget) would actively promote competition to provide health care has been changed to read that Monitor 'will prevent anti-competitive practices.' There is no discernible difference!

The aim of the Bill all along has been to break up the NHS by allowing private companies to bid for contracts to provide the health services they consider most easy and profitable to take on. Since they aim to make a profit there will be a worse but more expensive service. What money is left in the NHS budget after the private providers have creamed off the profitable services will not be enough to adequately treat people with serious or complex conditions and for Accident & Emergency services. These will be rationed even more and people will be faced with the 'choice' of paying privately or doing without treatment. Any Tory politician's statements that they have no intention of breaking up or privatising the NHS is pure lies. They have already gone a long way down that road. The Health 'Reform' Bill has removed the Secretary of State's responsibility to ensure there is universal health care provision around the country. If the Bill is finally passed in its current form, what free NHS treatment you can get will depend on where you live.

The trouble with meetings organised by trade unions is that they tend to let the Labour Party off rather too lightly. Nobody challenged the two Labour MPs on their party's record of introducing competition into the NHS in the first place and of devising the (wasteful and discredited) Private Finance Initiative to fund the building of hospitals. Only a member of Manchester Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) challenged Michael Meacher and Debbie Abrams to say whether the Labour Party would undertake to re-nationalise the NHS and return it to a comprehensive and fully publicly funded service. Neither MP replied to the question, not even to give a waffly politician's answer.

The campaign against health service privatisation is now focussing on lobbying the House of Lords, plus organising a demonstration of the Tory Party conference in Manchester on 2nd October. The House of Lords lobby is being done through an Adopt A Peer scheme, for which there are details on the national TUC's website. If you join it, you will be assigned a Peer to write to, with information about what points you can make about the Health Bill. Whatever the limitations of lobbying as a campaign tactic, the usefulness of lobbying Peers is that a lot of them have no party affiliation and so are not concerned with following any party line. They are at least in a position to make serious waves and hold up the Bill enough to induce the Condems to make concessions and amend it, if they don't actually throw the whole thing out.

Both the TUC website and the Manchester Coalition Against Cuts website should have some information about the demonstration. However big it turns out to be, I suspect it will be a fairly standard march from A to B, but it does intend to be about the public spending cuts in general, which will at least give people scope to protest about any aspect of the cuts they wish.

There is also a plan, not started by the TUC, to 'occupy Manchester' during the Tory conference by setting up camp on Albert Square next to the Town Hall. For more details about this, 'Occupy Manchester' has a facebook page.