Mary Whitby – contribution at the SLWH rally at the Old Stone Arch, 7 October 2023

Good afternoon

I wanted to dispel some myths.

The NHS is not overwhelmed because we are all using it too much or because of so-called bed blockers nor because we are an aging population – we didn’t just beam down from Mars overnight!

 Nye Bevan said our ill health is not a commodity from which they should profit and yet even our our health records are up for sale.

Its not overwhelmed because we cannot afford to run a first class health service for all nor  because of covid, asylum seekers or migrants nor because staff have had enough of a decade of pay cuts and have decided to take industrial action.

So that’s just some of the myths.

The private sector lobbyists are funding political parties and politicians and so those parties make their policies reflect the demands of those private profiteers. Managers and politicians, including on the left, have been told the restructuring of the NHS was necessary as a response to supposedly changing needs. Labour complain its just a matter of low resources.

These myths serve to drown out the reality that the NHS has been carved up and shrunken to open up the space for the private sector to benefit.

In order to make money out of the NHS, providers take contracts to provide shrunken services at great cost to the public purse, employing fewer, less qualified staff, on lower pay hence why there are 130,000 unfilled vacancies.

When our NHS filled the space and our needs were met, we didn’t need to bother with the private sector, why would we pay again for something when we had the NHS which provided what we needed for free when we needed it?

So the private sector couldn’t get a foothold. They couldn’t compete with district general hospitals and family GPs. Successive governments of all parties have played their part in the break up of the NHS, allowing privateers to be embedded inside the NHS remodelling it

Worst of all we never voted for this

So that visual demonstration – if you shrink the NHS it stands to reason it can’t treat as many people as it did before. So even if we didn’t grow older, didn’t have any more babies then the NHS could not cope. They have closed tens of thousands of beds, closed hospitals and 125 A&Es so it is no wonder there are queueing ambulances, trolleys in corridors, people waiting 24 hours in A&E, virtual wards, people unable to get a GP appointment or a scan or 7.7m people suffering on waiting lists.

This is what we mean when we talk about the denial of care.

It is not the NHS model which can’t cope though, it’s the 42 separate American Integrated Care Systems which have caused this crisis which is set to worsen again this winter.

What does  7.7m people on waiting lists look like? If you add up all the populations of the 14 biggest cities in the country then it still doesn’t add up to 7,700,000 people! (Since writing this speech that figure has increased to 7,800,000 people)

To demonstrate how the NHS has been undermined, I have an assistant to help, he will stand over there away from the electrical equipment because I don’t want to be responsible for blowing up the mics and sending the Fans Supporting Foodbanks gazebo up in flames! – imagine there is a pint of beer in this pint glass.

 What happens if you try to pour a pint of beer into a half pint glass?

Yes! It overflows because it’s a physical impossibility to fit the same amount of beer into a glass which is half the size and so it is with what’s left of our health service. There are the same amount of patients but the capacity of the NHS to meet our needs has been drastically reduced.

So all the beer overflowing from the glass represents the 7.7m people on waiting lists, it represents all the public NHS funding which never reaches frontline services or staff pay packets but is siphoned off into private pockets, its the staff leaving the NHS, it is all those people who die unnecessarily every week, it represents all those people forced to get into debt and go private to get the medical care they desperately need.

Health is a multi billion dollar commodity and our ill health will be bought and sold if we don’t fight.

In the 5th richest country in the world, we can afford a high-class NHS. In fact, we can’t afford not to have one unless we want to pay with our lives and the lives of the generations to come after us.

So we want you to join our movement to raise awareness in your friends, family, and workplaces in your union branches and communities, have those conversations, spread the word and encourage everyone to become active. As Nye Bevan said the NHS will last as long as there are people willing to fight for it.

Are you willing to fight?