Thatcher and the NHS

When a vicious ruling-class warrior dies, the working class rejoice. But sadly Margaret Thatcher’s vile capitalist legacy lives on; now within even the body politic of the Labour Party, which like the Tories has worked hard to dismantle the NHS.

Part of Thatcher’s legacy has recently come to fruition here in Leicester, which recently saw corporate profiteer Interserve plc win a seven-year contract worth up to £700 million to run the services for the Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and the Leicester City, Leicestershire County and Rutland Primary Care Trust Cluster.

According to Interserve, this lucrative deal “represents the first time a group of trusts have joined together to manage facilities across all local NHS services, including health centres, hospitals and community services.”  So who one might ask are Interserve, and what is the Thatcher connection?

Employing over 50,000 people worldwide, Interserve consider themselves to be one of the “world’s foremost support services and construction companies.” The Thatcher connection then comes through their chairman, Lord Norman Blackwell, who was the former head of John Major’s Prime Ministerial Policy Unit (from 1995-1997), and is a current board member (and former chair) of the Centre for Policy Studies.

The Centre for Policy Studies is a right-wing think tank that was set up by Thatcher and her elitist friends in 1974 to force government policy ever further towards the interests of big business. The Centre has always maintained a special hatred of the NHS, and in 1988 they published a sickening pamphlet called “Britain’s Biggest Enterprise: Ideas for Radical Reform of the NHS.” A pamphlet that “provides a coherent justification for the trajectory of change to the NHS that we have seen implemented by the governments in power since that time.”

In the same year, the coauthor of this pamphlet, John Redwood, penned the preface for a book titled Privatising the World: a book which “includes a ten-page guideline for privatising public assets against the wishes of the electorate, a formula which has been faithfully followed in the case of our health care system.”

Needless to say, John Redwood, who previously headed the international privatisation unit for pioneering privatisers NM Rothschild and Sons Bank, has made sure that his good buddies have reaped handsome profits from the brutal dismemberment of one of the world’s most efficient and well-supported health service providers.

The working-class are quite right to celebrate Thatcher’s death, but her deadly legacy remains with us. Therefore, it is vital that such celebrations be used to facilitate a fight-back against the violent privatisation of the world. Through building a democratic movement that is capable of creating a government that is truly representative of the working class, such party-goers will be able to look forward to the biggest party of all time… the one that marks the creation of a socialist society that is capable of providing justice for all and not just for a few.

As part of this process of building for this future celebration, why not come to our next meeting (at 7.15pm next Wednesday, 17 April) at Richard III pub to discuss how we might work together to fight for a fairer society.

(For an extended version of this article see “Thatcher’s Legacy of NHS Butchery.”)