General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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The NHS - A manifesto for renewal
FAWZI IBRAHIM argues that the NHS needs reforms to bring it back to its original tenets and outlines five fundamental changes that are critical to achieving this
KS+WS
After brutal police crackdowns on pensioners and the forced approval of secret IMF deals, trade unions are finally responding to grassroots pressure and fighting back against savage neoliberal reforms, reports BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
SOON after the establishment of the NHS in 1948, efforts were made to dilute its provisions and undermine its principles from the introduction of charges for prescriptions, for dental care and for spectacles in 1952 right through to Margaret Thatcher’s internal market, the closer collaboration with the private providers and PFI under the Tony Blair government and the removal of the duty on the secretary of state to secure and provide healthcare for all in the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.
The assault was incessant resulting in significant erosion of NHS provisions and a gradual undermining of the core principle of the NHS as outlined in the 1948 Act which placed a duty on the secretary of state to provide key universal health services throughout England.
This core principle was deliberately subverted and substituted with “free at the point of delivery,” promoted energetically by the Blair and subsequent governments which went unchallenged at the time.
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