Last Monday hospital consultants all over Britain started industrial action (emergency treatment only), in what the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) described as 'the final confrontation with the Government' over the issue of private practice.
Behind a smokescreen of mock-heroics and hypocrisy about defending freedom and democracy', the consultants are putting the whole NHS at The proposals of the Labour Government, which have provoked such fury from the consultants, are tnat tne private beas at present un the NHS (nearly 5,000) should be phased out, while the growth of private medicine outside the NHS should be limited to the replacement of such beds. But a close look at these proposals shows that they hardly amount to an attack on private practice at all. In fact, Barbara Castle has publicly stated that the present Labour Government will defend the consultants' "right' to practise privately!
TO THE BONE Indeed, Labour's proposals entail no cut in the number of private beds. While Castle is busy closing down NHS hospitals and slashing the NHS hospital building programme to the bone, she is also proposing to license the building of the equivalent of up to 20 major (500 bed) private hospitals!
Such an expansion of the private sector - doubling the number of beds for major acute treatment -will mean a further step towards the establishment of a private health industry in direct competition with the NHS. It will mean a further drain of staff from the NHS - drastically understaffed.
By separating private practice from the NHS, the Labour Government hopes to head off the struggles of health workers and other sections of the labour movement at a time wnen it Is carrying our massive curs in the NHS. However, the consultants are not used to tolerating even the merest hint of any restriction on their freedom to exploit their positions.
What they fear most of all is direct action by health workers against private practice and their control of medical treatment - something which has been forcibly raised in the campaign for free abortion on demand. In this they are correct. Such examples of action point the way forward to get rid of private practice once and for all and strike the first blows in a campaign to defend and extend the NHS.
REACTIONARY The consultants have deliberately chosen this time to take action. The refusal of the Wilson Government to grant the demands of the junior hospital doctors for a 40-hour week already with adequate overtime pay has meant
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risk. They are doing this simply to maintain their ill-gotten 'right' to ex- ploit sickness for their own gain.