The government will announce their decision on the closure of Lewisham Hospital Accident and Emergency and Maternity Units  on 04 February. The Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign has called for a mass protest march on Saturday 26 January to let Jeremy Hunt, Tory Health Minister, know that the people of Lewisham are in complete opposition to the threatened closure.

Mass Opposition and Anger to Closure Continues to Grow!                                                                  The mass opposition to the cuts in Lewisham Hospital continues to grow  as more and more people recognise the Tory/Lib-Dem plans for the NHS is about attacking the very idea of the National Health Service.

Join the Protest March!                                                                                                                          We must mobilise all opposition to join the demonstration on Saturday 26 January – Assemble 12 noon at the ‘Grassy Knoll’ near Reynolds Street car park, Lewisham (opp. Lewisham DLR station) – we will be marching past the hospital to Mountsfield Park where there will be hot food, a rally with speakers from the campaign, music and a chance to sign the 100 ft letter of Protest which will be delivered to Jeremy Hunt on Monday 28 January.

South London Health Care Trust has excellent clinical outcomes and enormous PFI debts. Last year the Trust ‘overspent’ by £65 million and paid out £69 million on PFI. Instead of cancelling the debt, the government wants to close down wards and services.

PFI (Private Finance Initiative) was a scheme set-up by a Tory government led by John Major in the 1990s and was continued with enthusiasm by New Labour.

PFI allows a consortium of private investors (usually a mixture of finance, construction and service industry capitalists) to build and maintain a public building, like a hospital, and then rent it back to the public like a massive hire-purchase scheme.

Extortionate

The consortium also locks the public sector into maintenance contracts. After several decades of extortion the building eventually falls into public ownership. A lot of PFI contracts were sold off after the initial building work. Carillion, for example, sold its rights to a future PFI income to Portsmouth’s Queen Alexandra Hospital for £31 million after an initial investment of just £12 million – a 160% profit!

According to analyst Dexter Whitfield, a great majority of PFI assets are now held by private individuals in offshore tax havens.

If the government wishes to borrow money for the big capital investment projects (like building hospitals), it can do so at rock bottom rates. By using PFI, the government is choosing to pay more to private contractors leaving the NHS with less.

Total PFI payments will reach £65 billion by 2048 – for hospitals that cost just 11.3 billion to build.

South London Healthcare now pays out 15% of its operating budget on servicing PFI.

Allyson Pollock states: “the high costs of PFI debt charges means that the NHS can only operate anything from a third to half as many services and staff as it would have done had the scheme been funded though conventional procurement. In other words, for every PFI hospital up and running, equity investors and bankers are charging as if for two”.

The socialist solution is to cancel the debt and take the hospitals into public ownership. By doing that we can liberate the NHS from its role as a slush fund for private investors and free up taxpayers’ money to be spent on equitable healthcare.

Labour pledged at its last conference that it would ‘liberate the NHS from extortionate PFI debt’; but the labour leadership will need to feel the force of a mass working class movement behind them before they stand up to capitalist class interests and reverse their former policy.

Even the Tories could easily take the PFI debt onto the public accounts, thus cancelling it for South London Healthcare Trust and enabling it to continue without closures.

The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Women’s Hospital (EGA) in Central London was occupied or conducted work-in from 1976 – 1978 and they won!

David Ennals, the then Labour Government Health Minister, announced the closure of EGA in 1976. In July workers protested against the threatened closure of EGA, and staged a ‘Day of Action’ then marched to the House of Commons. By November 100 nurses and 78 ancillary staff began the work-in/occupation of the hospital making the demand that the Area Health Authority repair the lift and undertake necessary maintenance work (EGA had been massively under invested in for some years in an effort to run down the service to close it).

The workers in the work-in continued to admit and care for  patients, and keep the hospital in a working state of repair. Organising committees were set up by general meetings of those in the occupation. Committees organising the work-in included the Joint Shop Stewards Committee (the latter was made up of representatives of the different sections of workers in the hospital and linked trade unionists and consultants).

The Campaign Committee (Save EGA)  consisted of supporters from outside the hospital and was set up by Camden Trades Council, it then became autonomous, drawing in residents, users, patients, housing and childcare campaigns. In other words, it was a broad community campaign. The main support for the work-in came from the Campaign Committee.

In order for the work-in to have insurance cover they had to have a member of the hospital management on-site, in the case of the EGA work-in that was the hospital secretary.

As the work-in progressed ideas and demands developed from keeping the EGA open to the EGA becoming an upgraded ‘centre for innovation and research’ in women’s health matters and being a community resource.

Campaigners sponsored and organised discussion meetings relating to women’s health issues often over 200 women would attend. There were also arguments between doctors and women users of the service challenging the medical establishment.

In 1978 a big demonstration stopped the traffic on Euston road outside the hospital. In 1979 campaigners won the battle to keep the EGA open as a gynaecological hospital.