Anybody with two or more living brain cells should be well aware that our National Health Service is being privatised. The strategy of continual highlighting failings in the service, creates dissatisfaction and raises expectations, and calls for change, this is engineered by propaganda from our babbling brook of bullshit, and lack of funding from a government cabal of greedy millionaire private enterprise junkies. As the crescendo of complaints keeps rising, the call for change increases and from the private enterprise entrepreneurs, their call is always, private money, open the NHS to the market. You have to hand it to them for their persistence and determination, this call has been going on since the birth of the NHS, our problem is that they are more than half way there.
The years between 1976 and 1994 saw a spate of hospital occupations, perhaps the time is right for a return to this tactic. If you want a NHS that is publicly owned and free at the point of need, you will have to do something drastic and very soon, or it will be British National Health Service, PLC.
This is a quote from Past Tense, a very interesting, and worth reading document:
past tense
Occupational Hazards
Occupying Hospitals:inspirations and issues from our history
A past tense Dossier
Between 1976 and 1994. more than twenty hospitals in the UK were occupied either wholly or partly by either staff who worked in them, or by local communities, or both; usually to prevent threats to close or merge them, cutting services and slashing jobs. Some were successful, some were not, but work-ins or occupations were a widespread and accepted tactic.
With the looming threat of ‘re-organisations’ and further cuts and closures in the NHS looming, could occupations and work-ins be back on the agenda?
Occupational Hazards documents some inspiring tales from the past, and asks some questions about some of the issues and problems arising from taking over a hospital.
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