Workers Revolutionary Party - GROWING NHS PROTESTS

The News Line: News Monday, 9 October 2006 GROWING NHS PROTESTS – NEW ‘POLL TAX’ REBELLION

UNISON head of health KAREN JENNINGS (centre) joined the 5,000-strong march in Nottingham against NHS cuts

Health campaigners yesterday warned that NHS privatisation and cuts will be ‘Labour’s poll tax’.

The warning came as the number of protests mushroomed around the country.

Geoff Martin, head of campaigns at pressure group Health Emergency said: ‘There’s been nothing like this since the spontaneous rebellion against the poll tax in the early 90s.’

Yesterday, health workers and local people held a ‘Hands Around the Hospitals’ demonstration, called by the Keep Worthing and Southlands Hospitals (KWASH) campaign to show local people’s disgust at the projected closure and downgrading of local hospital facilities.

Several rallies took place on Saturday.

More than 1,000 people took part in a protest in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, where Hinchingbrooke Hospital faces closure in the face of a £24m deficit.

Supporters joined the Huntingdon demonstration from Suffolk, where Hartismere Hospital in Eye is to close and 16 beds are to go from Aldeburgh Community Hospital.

In Huddersfield, protesters demonstrated against a decision to switch the town’s maternity services to a hospital in Halifax.

In recent weeks, demonstrators have also turned out in Southampton, Nottingham, Cambridge, Redditch, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Epsom.

A demonstration has been called in Oxford next Saturday.

London Health Emergency’s Martin said: ‘An extraordinary grass roots movement against government policy on hospital closures and privatisation is putting thousands of people on the streets every weekend in villages, towns and cities the length and breadth of the country.’

He added: ‘The government is right to be worried. The full scale of its closure programme, which will involve up to 60 major acute hospitals, has yet to hit home and when it does the scale of the protest will ratchet up several notches.’

UNISON head of health Karen Jennings said local people were joining protests ‘in their droves’.

She added: ‘It shows that people are not interested in choice or privatisation.

‘What they want is a good local hospital they can use when they are sick.’

The TUC-affiliated health unions, along with the BMA, RCN and RCM, have formed NHS Together and are lobbying parliament on November 1.