By Mark Ladbrooke
With 18 months to go to a General Election, an incoming Labour government will be under enormous pressure to maintain concessions and make further accommodation to powerful corporate interests in running and providing health services.
It has never been a more important time to build pressure within the Labour Party and among unions and campaigners to resist this and reaffirm the founding principles of the NHS: a universal service, free, publicly provided and accountable.
The SHA supports this not out of sentimentalism – we are quite aware that the NHS is a flawed diamond. It’s partly a reflection of the unjust society in which it exists. It is also significantly in advance of that society which in general distributes goods and services according to wealth.
NHS distributes services according to need. Not perfectly but its shortcomings are fixable.
Though significantly underfunded it is able to deliver more than other health systems because the layer of profit extraction has, until relatively recently, not existed.
Join us for the Socialist Health Association’s NHS 75 Conference, featuring campaigning NHS workers, union leaders, overseas workers, MPs, and all of us who use the service on 1st July in Conway Hall, London.
The aim of the conference is to develop a way forward. What is the path out of privatisation and the market in the NHS? How do we rebuild a publicly funded, publicly provided and publicly planned NHS underpinned by a public health approach in all government policies?
The event is backed by: Doctors in Unite, Keep Our NHS Public, War on Want, RMT, and new endorsements are arriving daily.
Speakers include Zarah Sultana MP, Ian Byrne MP, Rosena Allin-Khan MP, migrant champions Cllr Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini and Aliya Yule, Lester Holloway from “The Voice” on Windrush, Asad Rehman from WoW, researchers and activists Sally Ruane, Rathi Guhadasan, Faiza Shaheen, Liz Peretz and Benjamin Goodair, nurse campaigner Antonia Berelson, junior doctor Dan Zahedi from BMA, Helen O’Connor from GMB, Riccardo la Torre from FBU, Onay Kasab from Unite, Alex Gordon from RMT, Tony O’Sullivan from Keep NHS Public, Hope Worsdale from Just Treatment, Coral Jones from Doctors in Unite, Esther Giles and Caroline Bedale from SHA.
Everyone welcome! SHA members and all others for our NHS.
#nhs75
Time and place:
Saturday, July 1st 2023 10:15 AM – 4:30 PM, Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL
Mark Ladbrooke is Chair of the Socialist Health Association.
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