The Workers Party of Britain’s commitment to the National Health Service is absolute. The NHS is now made up of 42 public-private partnerships called Integrated Care Systems which are dominated by private businesses outside democratic control. What has been done to the water industry has been done to national healthcare. The likely outcome is the abandonment of equitable care free at the point of use through service denial. We will end this system immediately and fully re-nationalise the NHS.
PFI instituted by the New Labour Government has been a disaster, The debt burden is draining vital funds from patient care. We will undertake an investigation into these contracts not only in the health service but in other sectors and legislate if necessary to change the terms and conditions.
The Government is also deskilling and the workforce as a fake solution to a workforce crisis engineered by the very people claiming to resolve it. The aim is to reduce staff wages. This deskilling is a material threat to the safety of patients. We will restore decent pay levels to help retain and recruit the most qualified staff.
NHS capacity is inadequate for demand. The results include the notorious waiting lists but of equal importance is the knock-on effect of the collapse in social care provision. It will be a main aim of ours to increase health service capacity and integrate this with increased social care provision. We will also initiate a massive reduction in the scale of the administrative and management structure of the NHS which has increased from 4% of budget to 14% of budget over the last seventeen years and is heading higher.
Prevention will be central to our national health strategy which will be directed to the five key drivers of health outcomes – nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress and loneliness. We will declare war on ultra-processed food, improve the standard of school meals and invest in health education. Big Food and Big Pharma will be regulated to ensure positive outcomes at every level of national health.
We have already stated our policy on the pharmaceuticals industry in our section on redistributive economics but it bears repeating here because it is linked to the management of national healthcare. A private pharmaceuticals sector operating with a public health service structure is a recipe for profiteering and potential malpractice. We recognise that the situation in regard to the latter is far worse in the US. This is one of the drivers for our opposition to the deliberate Americanisation of our public services with its most disturbing advocates in the Labour Party. Let us be crystal clear – we will take a decisive role in the pharmaceuticals industry because we consider healthcare to be a matter of national strategic importance.
Mental Health
The evidence is clear that we seeing a growing crisis of mental health. Our analysis suggests that a great deal of this is down to three factors – the collapse of community, the insecurities created by neo-liberalism and the hysteria of university-based cultural engineering. A malign alliance has emerged between increasingly unhinged identity politics and the neo-liberal elite where Frankenstein’s monster (identity politics) now partially controls its former master (capitalism).
The Workers Party of Britain believes that the mental health crisis in our part of the West is as important as a subject for policy as anything else in this Manifesto. Primarily we will deal with it through material means – redistribution of resources to give security to working households and particularly the low paid and vulnerable, investment in the integrated health and social care system to help support the mentally ill, decent housing provision, greater mental health awareness and a drive to improve the nutritional, exercise, sleep and other health aspects of the mind.
However, there is a cultural aspect which we will not neglect. There will be no support for identity politics or non-jobs for middle class graduates to support the NGO-industrial complex. Everyone will be encouraged throughout the educational system to ‘be their own person’ and to be personally proud of their lifestyle choices instead of depending for their worth on the weird theories of university theoreticians and the neuroses of American progressivism. Arts spending will be on national and working-class culture and public money will not be wasted on sectional interests. We will be one nation where class or interest is the key factor in politics.
The rebuilding of community goes alongside a commitment to find ways to alleviate loneliness while leaving those who want solitude to have their silences. Governments cannot legislate human relationships. Our ethos is one of respect and tolerance for individual lifestyle choices. However, Government can create the conditions by which local arts and culture can flourish, people have access to help when they need it and no one has a sleepless night because they lack money or are threatened with disease or homelessness.
Julie Lowe 