Southwark Left Unity: NHS film showing

Jane Kelly reports and encourages other branches to show the film.

We held a successful meeting on 26th November on the rapid privatisation of the NHS. We showed a very impressive campaigning film, ‘Sell-Off’ by documentary film-maker Peter Bach. This exposed the 20 year long process of increasing privatisation carried out by the governments of both major parties from Thatcher to Blair to Cameron.

Structured into ten sections it showed the way in which Tory grandees such as Oliver Letwin had been planning this for a very long time in two books written in the 1980s.

The film argued that the continued attacks on the NHS, including on nurses and doctors etc, is the very same process used to privatise British Rail and more recently Royal Mail – run it down by cuts and blame these public sector organisations for not being able to cope.
The hospitals in Staffordshire, that tried to deal with cuts in income by cutting staff numbers to dangerously low levels, leading to the scandal and many patient deaths, has led to the NHS’ biggest ever outsourcing of services worth over £1.2bn with Branson’s Virgin company one of the main bidders.

Under the Labour government, PFI (Private Finance Initiative) was used to build hospitals leading to the bankrupting of several hospital trusts because of the extortionate interest rates, including interest rate swaps revealed by the Libor scandal.

Over 200 parliamentarians have recent or present financial private healthcare connections, yet they were all allowed to vote on the Health and Social Care Bill as it went through parliament – a conflict of interest that would not have been accepted at local authority level.
Bullying and intimidation has been used against whistle-blowers trying to expose some of these scandals.

The film was followed by an interesting talk by Dr Bob Gill, a South London GP and member of the National Health Action party, who also appears in the film, and Mark Boothroyd, a staff nurse from St Thomas’ Hospital. There was a discussion in which nearly all those who came spoke.

The top-down reorganisation and privatisation of the NHS (something Cameron explicitly denied in the run-up to the last election) as well as the debate on immigration, are going to be the main issues of contention leading to the election next May. Ironically the NHS couldn’t run without migrant labour. Eleven percent of all staff working for the NHS and in community health services are not British. The proportion increases for professionally qualified clinical staff (14%) and even more so for doctors (26%).

I would encourage all Left Unity branches to show the film and it could also be shown at trade union branch meetings, community groups, etc.

It is available on Youtube (see above) or as a DVD, contact:
facebook.com/selloffnhs
distribution@selloff.org.uk