Workers Revolutionary Party - HALT NHS PRIVATISATION!

The News Line: News Monday, 15 September 2014 HALT NHS PRIVATISATION!

Demonstration in east London in July against the sell-off of GP surgeries

THE Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which Unite says places the NHS at ‘unique risk of being irreversibly privatised’, will not exclude healthcare, Tory Health Minister Earl Howe insisted yesterday.

The TTIP conditions are currently being negotiated by the EU and US.

Unite has warned that the TTIP is aimed at increasing the power of multinational investors and hedge funds, while reducing regulation of these organisations.

The TTIP would create a single market between the European Union and the United States, removing barriers between public assets and multinational corporations, said the union.

TTIP would ‘scupper’ plans to reverse privatisation of health services in this country, said Unite, making it impossible for any European government to reverse the privatisation of public assets, such as the railways or healthcare.

Howe said yesterday that healthcare would not be excluded, since it would not be in the interests of British pharmaceutical and medical technology companies to seek an exemption.

‘The potential for them is immense – it would be highly unwise and detrimental in our view to exclude health,’ he said.

He said removing trade barriers will allow British exporters of goods and services to expand sales in the American market.

At the TUC Congress last week, Unite called for the Tories to seek a formal exemption for the NHS from the TTIP. They have, however, refused.

Congress however refused to take action to defend the NHS and defeat the privatisation, with a general strike to bring down the coalition.

They prefer to hope in a miricle: that a Labour government will defy the international financiers behind the TTIP.