•This conference views with concern the inader quacies of the National Health Service and calls upon the leadership of the Labour and trade union movement to pledge itself to a socialist policy for the Health Service.
Conference therefore:
(a)rejects any cuts in the National Health Service and demands a very substantial immediate increase in health expenditure to recruit new staff, pay adequate wages, provide attractive career structures at all levels, replace outmoded buildings, and ensure the provision of an equally high standard of health service facilities throughout the United Kingdom, and believes that in future health expenditure should be linked to price and wage indices to protect the vational Health Service from further cuts;
(b)calls for a fully free National Health Service at the point of use with complete abolition of prescription, dental and other charges;
(c) welcomes the proposed remuval of private pracThe resolution on the National Health Service (above) carried against the executive's wishes at last week's Labour Party Conference is the latest sign - following similar resolutions at the NALGO and ASTMS conferences - of a growing awareness in the broad labour movement of the need to fight back against the attacks on the NHS.
There is no doubt that there is significant support for these demands, not just in the health service unions but right throughout the whole workers' movement. The task now is to mobilise that support and to bring it into mass action against thie policies of the Labour There should be no false hopes that because the Conference has gone on record for these Tient insurance plans;
ical supplies, (e) demands the abolition of all nursing agencies side contractors for any purpose;
demands, the Wilson Cabinet will now put them into practice. The resolution is in complete opposition to the plans of the Government.
The Labour leaders are determined to cut back on public spending - they intend to cut the NHS, not improve it. Wages, jobs anc health are being sacrificed to pay for capitalism's crisis. The needs of the NHS and its working class patients are being subordinated to the interests of a bankrupt capitalism by the Labour Government.
The decision of the Labour Party Conference is nevertheless important. It can be the beginning of a campaign to defend and transform the NHS. What is now needed is for delegates to the Conference, the local Labour tice from the National Health Service but is concerned that it be completed rapidly and that ex- vIce; isting part-time contracts must end. It further demands that the long-term aim of the Labour Party be the total abolition of private practice with all private medical care outside the National centres; Health Service under Government control as a first step and the prohibition of all private pat(d) demands the public ownership of the pharmaceutical and other industries which are major suppliers to the National Health Service with compensation on the basis of need, with state monopoly over import and export of drugs and medand the rapid move by the National Health Service towards the non-use of agency staff or out(f) calls for all management bodies to be democratically elected and to include elected representParties and the trade unions to mobilise ins side the entire workers' movement for a mass campaign to smash private practice both inside and outside the NHS, and to organise in the localities and nationally against any cuts that are being made.
This involves supporting bodies like the Medical Committee Against Private Practice.
MCAPP's conference this weekend Against The Cuts in The NHS' will attract over three hundred delegates, the overwhelming majority of them from the mass organisations of the working class. This is an example of how a serious fight can be launched to implement the resolutions on the NHS.
Of course such a conference has to broaden atives of all grades of employees within the ser(g) calls for an extension of occupational, preventative and rehabilitive health care schemes with a major expansion in the number of health (h) calls for extended facilities for pregnancy testing, contraception and abortion so that they are available to all women on request free of charge and opposes moves to restrict the availability of abortion on social grounds.
Conference, desperately alarmed at the stagnation in morale and innovation in the National Health Service and concerned at the continued ercsion and constant amendment of plans for the future, calls. upon the Government to publish, within one year, a major White Paper embodying a Ter Year Plan for the development of the service.
- Moved by National Union of Public Employees - Seconded by Liverpool (Wavertree) CLP its base even more wicely. It has to organise local conferences and work towards a national demonstration against the cuts. In the localit ies it has to sink its roots into the trade union movement. It has, together with other working class organisations and individuals, to fight back wherever and whenever cuts are made, and it has to be in the forefront of a campaign to build a health service based on the needs of and controlled by the working class.
If a real united workers' movement is built up to fight on these issues, then it can begin to show the way forward not only on the question of the NHS but for the whole campaign against the anti-working class policies of the Wilson leadership
red weekly