The Government’s Plans To Privatise The NHS: The Voice Of Anti-Capitalism In Guildford Investigates

“The unions should no longer criticise from the sidelines but recall their membership in special conferences and discuss how to mobilise to defend every single hospital and NHS unit, and make sure this Health Bill cannot be implemented”. 

Or go down to the summary

The publication of the Health and Social Care Bill last month heralds dramatic changes for the NHS, which will affect the way public health and social care are provided in the UK. Those changes alone will have huge impact, but it is the formation of an NHS Commissioning Board, and GP commissioning consortia, that will once and for all remove the word “national” from the health service in England. The result, due to come into force in 2013, will be the catastrophic break up of the NHS.

Out go strategic health authorities and 152 primary care trusts and in come several hundred general practitioner consortiums, responsible for commissioning £80bn of NHS care from “any willing provider.” This means Privatisation!

Putting general practitioners (GPs) in charge of commissioning health services for their patients is similar, in some respects, to the fundholding experiment in the 1990s. The principle then was that GPs controlled the budgets to buy the specialist care their patients needed. Fundholding took years to implement, but evidence on short-term or long-term benefits for patients is lacking. In the current Bill, health outcomes, including prevention of premature death, will be the responsibility of the NHS Commissioning Board, which has been asked to publish a business plan and annual reports on progress. That business plan is urgently needed to allow transparent appraisal of how the Board plans to monitor patients’ outcomes.

The UK coalition Government has now been in power for about 8 months. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats included the formation of an NHS Commissioning Board, or GPs’ commissioning consortia, in their health manifestos. There was no mention of their health plans in either of the parties pledges and the plans were not mentioned in the coalition agreement. However, less than eight weeks after the election, an outline emerged in the white paper “Equity and excellence: liberating the NHS.

The speed of the introduction of the Health and Social Care Bill is surprising, especially given the absence of relevant detail in the health manifestos. The Conservatives promised, if elected, to scrap “politically motivated targets that have no clinical justification” and called themselves the “party of the NHS” — a commitment that seems particularly hollow now.

The NHS was unsurprisingly absent from the 2010 election campaign because satisfaction levels with the NHS were at an all time high, and for most of the electorate the NHS was a non-issue. In the words of Simon Stevens, president of global health at United Health Group, a company that stands to benefit from the reforms,“The inconvenient truth is that on most indicators the English NHS is probably performing better than ever.”

The House of Commons Health Committee’s report, “Commissioning 2011” points out that the proposed changes are to be implemented at the same time as annual efficiency savings of 4% over four years. The report says,“The scale of changes is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world. ”To pull off either of these challenges would therefore be breathtaking; to believe that you could manage both of them at once is deluded. Since its establishment in July, 1948, the aim of the NHS has been to offer a comprehensive service to improve health and prevent illness. Health care for all, for free, has been the common ethos and philosophy throughout the NHS. On July 3, 1948, in an editorial entitled “Our Service”, The Lancet commented: “Now that everyone is entitled to full medical care, the doctor can provide that care without thinking of his own profit or his patient’s loss, and can allocate his efforts more according to medical priority. The money barrier has of course protected him against people who do not really require help, but it has also separated him from people who really do.”

Now, GPs will return to the market place and will decide what care they can afford to provide for their patients, and who will be the provider. The emphasis will move from clinical need (GPs’ forte) back to cost (not what GPs were trained to evaluate). The ethos will become that of the individual providers, and will differ accordingly throughout England, replacing the philosophy of a genuinely national health service.  As it stands, the UK Government’s new Bill spells the end of the NHS.

Moving to consortiums will incur the costs of transition in addition to their recurring costs. On the basis of past National Audit Office data, the government has put the cost of the NHS reorganisation at £2-3bn. The white paper’s key financial pledge was to reduce the NHS’s management costs by more than 45%. GP consortiums would replace primary care trusts, which have administrative costs of over a billion pounds a year (for a population of 51 million) The potential consortiums have learnt that their running costs will be capped at between £25 and £35 per head of population which equals around 1.5billion a year (based on a £30 cap). So where’s the saving?

The government’s recent “bonfire of the quangos” provides an instructive example of how a rush job doesn’t necessarily guarantee the best outcome. Earlier this month, the parliamentary select committee on public administration criticised the axing of 192 public bodies and the merging of 118 more as poorly managed. It also said that the government’s NHS plans would not deliver significant cost savings or better accountability—two of the government’s key aims. The committee’s chairman said that,“The whole process was rushed and poorly handled and should have been thought through a lot more.”

Rationalising a few hundred arm’s length bodies hardly compares with turning the NHS upside down, yet the proposed timescale for the health reforms is dizzying. The bill promises that all general practices will be part of consortiums by April 2012, yet it took six years for 56% of general practices to become fundholders after the introduction of the internal market.

The health secretary has made much of these changes being evolutionary rather than revolutionary. People “woefully overestimate the scale of the change,” he said. After all, practice based commissioning, choice of provider, an NHS price list, and foundation trusts already exist. But a week later came the revelation that hospitals would be allowed to undercut the NHS tariff to increase their business. Health economists queued up to say what a terrible idea this was, citing evidence that it would lead to a race to the bottom on price, which would threaten quality. Taken with the opening up of NHS contracts to European competition law, it was the last piece of evidence needed to convince critics that the government was unleashing a storm of creative destruction onto the NHS, with the imperative: compete or die.

Regardless of the true motivation behind the governments plans, such radical reorganisations always adversely affect service performance. They are a huge distraction from the real mission of the NHS, “to deliver and improve the quality of healthcare” that can absorb a massive amount of managerial and clinical time.

With an estimated one billion pounds of redundancy money in their pockets, many of those made redundant in the reorganisation and “efficiency savings” of the NHS are likely to be employed by the new GP consortiums in much their same roles. It raises the question: if GP commissioning turns out to be simply primary care trust commissioning done by GPs, aren’t there less disruptive routes to this destination?

Meanwhile, government cuts haven’t gone away. Although the impact assessment of the new bill calculates that savings will have covered the costs of transition by 2012-13, the reorganisation will not have made any savings to contribute to the £15-£20bn efficiency savings the government requires from the NHS by 2014-15.

 East Sussex GPs Oppose Consotia
A recent survey of East Sussex GPs, conducted by the BMA found that more than 70 per cent of them fear patient care will suffer when changes to the NHS are given the go-ahead. The vast majority of GPs surveyed slammed government plans to put GP consortia in charge of health care. Just 7.7 per cent of respondents were convinced that GP consortia will be up to the task.

Although 58 per cent of the GPs believe too much money is wasted on bureaucracy in the NHS, just one in ten GPs approved government proposals to hand purchasing power to GPs. Under government plans, GP consortia will replace the East Sussex Downs and Weald Primary Care Trust by 2013 and will be responsible for buying 80 per cent of health services.

Dr Michael von Fraunhofer, of the Eastbourne consortium steering committee, said local consortia could be hamstrung with more than £30 million in debt from the outgoing PCT. He warned: ‘This will cripple patient care and the blame will fall on GPs unfairly. No matter how good, dynamic or inventive we are, we will be making massive cuts in choice and services just to stay afloat.’
Private Health Care Company, Care UK 
Meanwhile, private health firm, Care UK has won a £53m prison hospitals contract, despite an NHS bid offering a better service. The company has won the contract to run health services at eight jails in north east England, with its cheaper, lower quality bid. About 200 nurses’ jobs and pay could be under threat. Glenn Turp, of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was worried about infection control as Care UK ‘had no plans in place’.

An NHS executive who lost the contract, Les Morgan, sent an angry email to the Health Commissioning Unit which decides who should run healthcare at the eight jails. Morgan wrote: ‘Our bid was judged better on quality, delivery and risk. ‘We are keen to understand the large difference in scoring on price.’ Care UK’s then boss John Nash and wife Caroline donated £200,000 to the Tories before the general election, including £21,000 to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s private office.

BMA Discusses Strike Action
BMA boss, Dr Hajioff said, The British Medical Association will put ‘absolutely everything’ on the table including strike action when members determine their response to the government’s NHS Health and Social Care Bill. His comments come as health unions are planning further protests against plans by Barts and The London NHS Trust to cut 635 posts to save £56m over two years. This includes the loss of 250 nursing jobs and a 100 beds.

Similar plans are taking place all over Britain. The Royal Surrey in Guildford has already seen 400 redundancies and the loss of beds. BMA Council member Anna Athow said in a recent interview: “‘The Health Bill aims to accelerate the plans of the last government to physically close and destroy hospitals and make their staff redundant on a massive scale, in order to privatise the NHS”.

She continued; “The unions should no longer criticise from the sidelines but recall their membership in special conferences and discuss how to mobilise to defend every single hospital and NHS unit, and make sure this Health Bill cannot be implemented”. “The recalled Special Representative Meeting of the BMA on March 15 should discuss all options in this campaign. Hospitals must be occupied by local staff and campaigners in Councils of Action to stop them closing.’

In Summary   
1. Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill will encourage ’any willing provider’ to cherry pick profitable slices of NHS services. It’s the biggest-ever privatisation of health care anywhere in the world,

 2. The Bill will turn the NHS into a free market, cost billions to implement, and be far more unequal in its provision of services than the current system.

 3. GP consortia, with their budgets squeezed to create £20 billion of savings will have to restrict access to hospital care.

 4. GP consortia will have to employ private management consultants, who are the only people to have welcomed Lansley’s plans.

5. Patients will be even less informed as existing public bodies are replaced by local GP consortia, that function in secret sessions, and a remote national NHS Commissioning Board.

6. Health care services are to be privatised, with EU competition laws forcing GPs to put any service out to tender.

7. All limits on the money Foundation Trusts hospitals can earn from private medicine are to be scrapped. Hospitals will then prioritise attracting wealthy private patients.

8. Price competition is to be introduced in clinical services, despite warnings that this will undermine the quality of care.

9. The limited ’scrutiny’ proposals are a fraud: GP consortia and the Commissioning Board will take their decisions in secret, and are not even obliged to go through the motions of consultation.

10. The Bill is opposed by the health unions and the TUC, the majority of GPs, and virtually every organisation of health professionals, including the Royal College of GPs and the BMA.

That’s why Lansley must be stopped. It’s time for urgent political action to Kill Lansley’s Bill.
Read: “Kill Lansley’s Bill 10 good reasons” from the PCS Union. 

Save Our NHS Facebook Group
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Our-NHS/142561392425826?v=wall

Protest To Save The NHS on 9^th March          
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Our-NHS/142561392425826?v=wall#!/event.php?eid=176583299053096

Don’t forget: 26^th March. THE BIG ONE: TUC DEMO AGAINST THE CUTS.
Coaches leaving Guildford. Only £2.00 Rtn. Click link for details.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Our-NHS/142561392425826?v=wall#!/event.php?eid=178381258861986
or visit www.saveourservic.es

Royal Holloway University Anti-Cuts Alliance – Official Launch (Report By Guildford Against Fees And Cuts)

Public Meeting: Introduction To The Cuts

21^st, October 2010
Last night saw the official launch meeting of the Royal Holloway Anti-Cuts Alliance at the Royal Holloway University, Egham, Surrey. It was a fantastic meeting with over a hundred and fifty people in attendance.

So many meetings of this kind never go beyond phrasemongary, “Tories are bad, they eat your kids and kill your parents” etc. But every speaker was interesting and engaging. Each speaker brought a wealth of knowledge and loads of facts and figures.

The speakers spoke about the cuts from a variety of perspectives but all made the point that the fight against cuts in education and the rise in fees must be linked to the resistance to the wider public sector cuts.

The meeting heard speakers from Save Our Services in Surrey, UCU, BARAC (Black Activists Rising Against Cuts), The Student Union’s Women’s and Equality Officer, a member from the NUS National Executive and Ben Robinson from Youth Fight For Jobs.

Chris Leary from Save Our Services in Surrey gave an informative talk about what the cuts meant for the people in Surrey. Whilst Surrey is an affluent county said Chris, “there were many pockets of poverty”. According to the government’s survey of Boroughs, the Surrey Borough of Elmbridge was the ablest in the country to cope with the cuts. Runneymede, another Surrey borough came seventh. However Spelthorne came seventieth in the table. “There are 30,000 people working for Surrey County Council (SCC), many on low incomes, so not everyone in Surrey conforms to the stockbroker commuting stereotype” said Chris.  

“There was a move by SCC, earlier this year to force all secondary schools into a federation of academies thus divesting itself of all responsibility for secondary education. There was such resistance that the Council was forced to back down, but immediately approached the primary schools with the same proposal. Academies do worse in league tables”, Chris told the packed meeting. “They don’t even generate extra income”.     

Chris spoke of other cuts planned by the Council. “With regards to young people, the SCC has published the target of achieving zero needs for sixteen to eighteen year-olds, which means all young people will be in work or education. However the council is reducing the grant it gives to the private company that runs the Connections careers and counselling service. It is going to close twenty centres, leaving only Camberley and Epsom to service the entire county. We have already witnessed a reduction in social workers and their admin support”, Chris added.

“The council also plans to slash the grant it awards bus companies to provide non-profitable bus services. It has also announced it will scrap all of its education welfare officers”.

“The council is talking of scrapping its present library service and replacing it with mobile libraries that may only visit once every fortnight. SCC also plans to shut down its youth services, closing youth centres, some of which were  only opened two or three years ago”.

“These cuts are just a few of those announced following the Council’s Spending Review and come before the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review announced a couple of days ago”. “The government announced an unprecedented 20% reduction in revenues for local councils which will further devastate communities and local services”. Chris concluded that we need to link education issues with wider service cuts and build a coalition of resistance of students, workers and service users.

Next to speak was Duska Rosenberg, Royal Holloway Professor of Information and Communications Management and UCU member. She told the meeting that “whilst all other countries are investing in education, the UK is slashing budgets and predicted some Universities may close”. “This can only harm the future prosperity of the country”, she told the audience.

Professor Rosenberg spoke about the government’s plan to ring fence STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects whilst cutting funding for the arts and social sciences. As a professor whose discipline bridges the physical and social sciences, she told the meeting how the arts earn money for the economy.

“However it’s not just about economic growth, there’s also an issue of intellectual growth and education for its own sake. We need a government that respects this.

One cannot divide technology from social sciences”, she continued. “One needs to know how technological advances affect society”.

“A recent government think tank reported that the UK needs more graduates to compete in a knowledge economy, so each University needs to be preserved. However, it’s not just about academic staff, there are also thousands of administration and support jobs at stake. They are indispensible to Universities. It’s about all of us”.

A BARAC (Black Activists Rising Against Cuts) spokesperson addressed the meeting. He called the cuts disgusting. “According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies these cuts are the greatest since the World War Two”. The cuts, he said “will devastate all communities, but black people will be disproportionately effected. Black people already suffer from greater levels of unemployment. Black people die younger, and more black people go to prison than go to university”.

“Studies have proved that in times of recession racism increases and we can already see this dynamic taking shape in the way that asylum seekers are being scapegoated in the media. 80% of public sector workers are black and for the most part work in lower paid support jobs; these are the very jobs that are being targeted for cuts”.

He concluded that students have a proud tradition of anti-racism and urged all students to emulate the French and fight against the cuts. He finished with a quote from Nelson Mandela: “A society is judged by the way it treats its poor”.

We heard from the Student Union’s Equality and Diversity Officer that women will also be disproportionately affected by the cuts. “According to studies, 60% of students who are lone parents are considering giving up their studies due to the hike in tuition fees. Women already take longer to pay back their student loans.  Domestic violence services are also going to be cut, along with homophobic and HIV services”.

Ben Robinson from Youth Fight For Jobs also spoke from the platform. “The Education Maintenance Grant will be scrapped”, he told us. He said “the government has announced plans to cut a half million public sector jobs, but have not mentioned that it will have a knock on effect of creating another half million unemployed on top of this. Already there are 2.5 million people chasing a half million jobs. One quarter of all young people are unemployed, and for young black people it’s a half”.

“Presently, anyone under 25, cannot get housing benefit for their own home, they are limited to renting a room. The government’s spending review has raised this to 35 years. This means a loss of privacy, space and independence for claimants until they are 35 years old”.

“The government is only making cuts because they can get away with it”, said Ben. “The banks, still largely publically owned, have paid 15 billion pounds in bonuses this year. The richest UK banks are paying the lowest corporation tax in Europe”.

The last speaker to address the meeting was Sean, the NUS National Executive Mature Students officer. He told the meeting that the Browne Report meant that poorer students would receive a second class education because they will not be able to afford the higher fees charged by the leading Universities.

“The government’s emphasis on STEM subjects will mean only the richer Universities charging higher fees will be running Social Science courses. These will be unaffordable to most students, so that in future it will be the students from richer backgrounds taking the lead in politics and the media in later life.

The Tories, he told us “are finishing Thatcher’s job, marketising education and the NHS and attacking housing benefits, which are due to be capped at 30%  below the average cost of accommodation. “The UK’s structural debt stands at £100 billion whilst the richest thousand UK citizens have £80billion of personal wealth.

So, he concluded, “Lets all get to the demo on 10^th November and demand No Cuts And No Fees, and take this message to the Coalition Of Resistance conference on 23^rd November. And LETS GET FRENCH!!!!”
Statement of the Coalition Of Resistance
Royal Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance
Save Our Services in Surrey
Join Guildford Against Fees And Cuts on Facebook

Official Launch Meeting: Save Our Services in Surrey (Report By Guildford Against Fees And Cuts)

Official Launch Meeting: Save Our Services in Surrey

The 14^th October saw the official launch of the Save Our Services in Surrey campaign. 80 people came together to discuss the governments planned public service cuts and plan a local response. There were delegates from a dozen local union branches as well as several community and campaign groups.

Apart from the many trade union branches that sent delegates, there were delegates from Surrey County Council Trade Unions (SCCTU), Royal Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance, Peace & Justice Coalition, Peace Party, Guildford Transition Towns and Redhill Coalition Against The Cuts.

Save Our Services in Surrey has already been active prior to the official launch. It has successfully led campaigns that have saved Shortwood School and Ashford College and lobbied the council earlier in the year to oppose fire service cuts. 

The meeting took the form of an open discussion rather than having a panel of speakers.
Dan, from the Royal Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance told the meeting that the coming marketisation of education and public services will have dire consequences for the young and the vulnerable in society. The Royal Holloway NUS president recently stated that the two successful anti-cuts meetings on campus gave him the mandate to take action not just over education cuts but public spending cuts in general. The NUS at Holloway was fully backing the Anti-Cuts Alliance and its public meeting arranged for the 21^st, October.

A Surrey County Council union official spoke about the Council’s “Public Value Review” whose conclusions are due out next week. She told the meting; “We must fight for every job, and if we save just one job it will be a victory. We must work with many other communities and groups, and be proactive if we are to be successful”.

An official from the UCU spoke to the meeting, she said “the managers at the University of Surrey pretend they don’t know what’s going to happen about the cuts in the University. Everyone knows there are cuts coming, but the management are not being up-front about them”.

Another local union official spoke about the national debt that the government keeps telling us about. She said “yes, there is a huge debt at 48% of GDP, but this is nothing like the national debt following the war. For much of the 20^th Century the national debt was running at over 100% of GDP- and for the ten years after World War Two the National debt was over 200%- peaking at 250%. During this time the country was able to build schools, roads, undertake a massive house building programme and create the welfare state”. These cuts she concluded “were political and not economically motivated”.A union official from the Royal Surrey Hospital Trust told the meeting that management was restricting union activity and its campaigns over closures. He spoke of eighty recent redundancies with another eighty planned for the near future.

A student told the meeting that we were in this position because of the banks. “It’s not my fault” he said, “It’s not my mistake”.

A Green Party councillor and member of the Redhill Coalition Against The Cuts related his experiences of council meetings where “alternative service delivery” was being discussed. “Council meetings are always about the best ways to make cuts, not if the cuts should be made”. The council at Redhill plans to cut 20% of its workforce.

A Surrey unison member said to the meeting; “councillors don’t use services themselves because they tend to be better off. They don’t really know what it means to have their services cut. They often think council services are luxuries. 52 libraries are under threat in Surrey. The number of Social Workers and their support staff are being cut and the Council’s adult service is being slashed. Staff are already exhausted with case loads exceeding 100 cases. Managers should come out of their offices and see what is happening on the ground”.

Chris Leary, from Save Our Services in Surrey urged everyone to join SOSiS and create a central campaigning hub. “We can support individual campaigns by picketing and putting pressure on councillors and Council managers. We need to be united, proactive, and demand the services we need”.Before the meeting closed there was a unanimous vote to adopt the draft constitution and three officers were elected. Chair, Co-ordinator, and Outreach/Campaign Organiser.

Two further meetings were announced:
Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance meeting in Egham, 21^st October.
A student meeting against the cuts at the University Of Surrey 26^th October.
Join Guildford Against Fees And Cuts
Save Our Services in Surrey
Redhill Coalition Against The Cuts
Royal Holloway University Anti Cuts Alliance
Anti cuts coalition in Sussex and Surrey Public meeting

As We Prepare For An Autumn Of Discontent, We Look At Lessons Of The Last General Strike (1926)

May 1926: when workers stopped the country

Reprinted from Workers Power- May 2006

The May 1926 General Strike could have changed the course of British history but, as Andy Yorke and Mark Hoskisson explain, the trade union leaders demobilised the workers and handed victory to the bosses

“I suppose my usual critics will say I was groveling, and it is true. In all my long experience I have never begged and pleaded like I begged and pleaded all day today.” These were the words of Jimmy Thomas, a leading member of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), on May Day 1926.

Thomas had spent the day with Tory ministers in Downing Street, desperately trying to find a way to call off the imminent general strike. Meanwhile more than 100,000 workers, determined to stop an ongoing bosses’ offensive, gathered in Hyde Park for the biggest May Day demonstration in living memory.

But Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government gave Thomas no way out. They had prepared for battle. On Monday 3 May 1926, the TUC called the majority of organised workers out on strike. The British general strike had begun.

Preparations
The Tories were driven by an intensifying economic crisis on the one hand and by the need to counter the wave of militancy that had swept the globe since the Russian Revolution of 1917 on the other. Baldwin’s Tory government came to power in December 1924 determined to smash the unions.

On 30 June 1925, the owners of Britain’s coal industry terminated all existing wage agreements and slashed pay. All sides saw the attack on the miners as a test case. The TUC called solidarity strike action and the government retreated. It announced a nine month wage subsidy for miners and a Royal Commission on the industry.

This retreat was hailed as “Red Friday” by the workers’ movement. It demonstrated the power of workers’ solidarity. But instead of using it to prepare for a red future the union leaders sat back and congratulated each other. Yet it was clear that the Tories had no intention of giving up. Faced with Red Friday Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, explained: “We therefore decided to postpone the crisis in the hope of averting it, or if not of averting it, of coping effectively with it when the time comes”.

The government and employers began preparations. The country was divided into 10 districts, each under a “Special Commissioner” in charge of strikebreaking. The Tories strengthened the army and police, creating a Civil Constabulary reserve made up of ex-soldiers. They set up the Organisation for Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) – a semi-official strike breaking organisation that was set up to run the rail and road supply system.

In contrast the TUC, the “general staff” of the workers, made no preparations.

This passivity was all the more unpardonable given that there was a sizeable left-wing faction on the TUC leadership – the General Council. The miners’ leader, A J Cook, together with TUC president George Hicks and builders’ leader A.A. Purcell, enjoyed the support of many workers as they argued a militant line. But most of these lefts were, as Trotsky commented, radical in words rather than deeds.

It was left to the rank and file, organised in the Communist-led Minority Movement, to prepare from below. On the eve of the General Strike the Minority Movement was able to hold a conference of delegates from 547 union bodies, representing 957,000 workers. 

At this conference and throughout the general strike, the Communist Party correctly called for the setting up of local councils of action to organise and politically lead the strike. It also fought for workers’ defence of picket lines and strikers against the expected violence from scabs and the state. 

 

But while these policies were correct and the growth of the Minority Movement showed the growing influence of the CP (it had only 5,000 members in 1926), the policy of the party towards the “left” leadership was a fatal weakness.This all meant that the CP found itself tied to the left wing of the bureaucracy precisely at the moment when it needed to break with them and lead the Minority Movement in offering a fighting policy that could win the strike.

Employers’ offensive
In March 1926 the Tories went onto the offensive. The Royal Commission proposed scrapping subsidies to the coal industry, a measure that would immediately result in massive wage cuts and job losses. If it went ahead it would pave the way for similar policies in every industry.

Cook and the miner’s leadership rejected the proposals and declared the miners’ union ready to strike. The TUC was pledged to support the miners.

The right-wingers on the General Council, like Jimmy Thomas and Ernest Bevin, had a powerful influence that the lefts had done little to challenge. In an attempt to avert the crisis the lefts effectively ceded leadership to these two, dispatching Thomas on his famous trip to Downing Street to “beg and plead” for a compromise. They all feared that a general strike could lead to revolution – the last thing these reformists wanted.

But the miners were already locked out and a printers’ strike had started at the Daily Mail in protest at its anti-strike editorial. The Tories broke off negotiations and forced the TUC to call the strike.

The response from the ranks was immediate, solid and overwhelming. Once the working class had shut everything down it was immediately faced with the problem of who runs society. As councils of action and local strike bulletins mushroomed, millions of workers began to realise they could run society themselves.

The initial impetus for local councils of action came from the TUC, who envisaged them as mere strike co-ordinating committees. But once the fight was on, these councils gathered delegates from every type of workers’ organisation. Some of them became real centres of embryonic working class power, like the “soviets” which had taken power in Russia in 1917.

Mass pickets were organised to stop strike breaking at strategic workplaces, where, under police and army protection, the OMS had taken over.

In the Fife coalfield, in Scotland, the trades council formed a workers’ defence corps. A member of the Fife council of action wrote: “The organisation worked like clockwork. Everything was stopped – even the railway lines were picketed… After police charges on mass pickets, the defence corps, which 150 workers had joined at the outset, was reorganised. Numbers rose to 700, of whom 400 marched in military formation through the town to protect the picket. The police did not interfere again.”

Throughout the country the strike was gaining strength. In contrast the union leaders were desperate to find a way out. General and Municipal Union leader, Charles Dukes expressed their fears: “Every day the strike proceeded, the control and the authority was passing out of the hands of responsible executives into the hands of men who had no authority, no control.” A revolutionary situation was developing. The strike did not just call into question the survival of the government, it called into question the survival of the system.

Betrayal
What was urgently needed was a communist party that actively pushed this development towards its natural conclusion – the formation of a revolutionary workers’ government. This would have entailed preparing the workers for seizing power and smashing the obstacles that stood in their way-the police, the OMS and the army.

But the Communist Party failed to challenge the hold Hicks and Purcell had over the most advanced workers. And as the strike continued these lefts ran for cover behind the coat-tails of Bevin and Thomas. On 12 May, only nine days into the strike, the right wing delivered their unconditional surrender to the Cabinet. Bevin remarked: “We have taken a great risk in calling the strike off. I want to argue it must not be regarded as an act of weakness, but rather one of strength…it took a little courage to take the line we have done.”

The TUC lefts stayed silent. Even A. J. Cook, general secretary of the miners, refused to go over the heads of the TUC and call for continuation of the action from below. Yet the workers themselves showed no signs of wanting to retreat, on the day after it was called off 100,000 more workers came out on strike. But in the end the miners were left to fight alone, for seven more months. Starvation and isolation led to a terrible defeat.

The Communist Party failed to learn from the defeat indeed Stalin’s faction had to cover it up. They certainly attacked the right wing of the labour movement and their “left-wing satellites” but at the same time maintained their alliance with them in the ARC. They attacked Trotsky for his criticisms of the Anglo-Russian Committee and for his demands that the Russian trade unions should have publicly broken with the traitors in front of the working class.

To pursue the policy of “socialism in one country” inside the USSR, Stalin sought allies in the imperialist countries to ward off any attack on Soviet Russia. The “Anglo Russian Committee” (ARC) – an alliance struck between the Russian and British trade union leaders – was used by Stalin to promote sympathy for Russia and prevent, he hoped, imperialist attack. But this policy had a price. The CP had to promote the left reformist trade union leaders who were vital to this policy and mute its criticism of them in order to preserve the ARC.

These left leaders proved incapable of fighting the sell-out policies of the right wing and the CP never prepared its members, or the hundreds of thousands in the Minority Movement, to fight independently of the TUC leadership. Before and during the strike the CP’s main slogan – “All Power to the General Council” – disarmed and confused the militants – it was this very General Council, which organised the sell out.

Trotsky had outlined an alternative to this disastrous policy and warned in advance that the left leaders would vacillate and betray. But with Stalin’s campaign against “Trotskyism” in full swing his warnings were either suppressed or construed as “sabotage” because they undermined the ARC

The defeat of the general strike and the miners was a massive set back for the British workers. Thousands were victimised and wages slashed. General strikes were outlawed. The unions lost millions of members as the whole movement retreated after this strategic defeat of the working class.

The general strike was defeated not because the forces of the state were stronger than the working class, nor because the rank and file gave in, but because the union leaders were faced with a choice: the survival of capitalism or the fight for workers’ power. They preferred defeat to the threat of revolution and the revolutionaries were not armed with the right policies to be able to win the leadership from the bureaucratic traitors.

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