Support the junior doctors, save our NHS

As large numbers of people took to London today to protest against austerity, I was at a local demonstration against a particular manifestation of the government's political and economic agenda: NHS cuts. 

This comes, of course, the week before junior doctors withdraw their labour entirely, the first time doctors have taken industrial action of this sort in the history of the NHS. The immediate cause of the dispute are new contracts, which will disadvantage junior doctors financially and push them into working exhausting and unsafe hours. The issues are explained here. In the face of the misinformation being spread about the doctors and their demands by the government and their friends in the media, it is vital that the BMA's case is given publicity. If you feel able, challenge criticism of the strike when you hear it. The previous link is to a PDF of a BMA leaflet. You could print and distribute this.

The misinformation and attacks will be stepped up as the strike moves towards a greater intensity. Striking doctors will feel vulnerable and exposed. At this point, expressions of support and solidarity will matter: these really can make the difference between someone persisting with the action and their giving up. Find a local picket line and support it. Even going for a few minutes can make a difference. Having been a striker on a picket line myself, it really was incredibly heartening to know that people outside my workplace were behind us. Talk to strikers, bring food, coffee, whatever - above all, go.

Support from the Labour Party, locally and nationally, has been patchy. If this improves it would give political momentum to the doctors' cause, and increase the pressure on the government. If you're a member of a Labour or trade union branch pass a motion in support of the strike. Write to local Labour MPs and (politely) ask them to get behind the action. Here is a lightly adapted version of a motion passed by a CLP in Sheffield that you could use in your own context:

The NHS is being dismantled as a comprehensive, national, public service by this government, through both underfunding, marketisation and privatisation despite the NHS having proved itself as an efficient, successful and hugely popular model of healthcare.

The junior doctors dispute, together with the campaign to save NHS student bursaries, gives us an opportunity to step up our role in the fight to save the NHS.

This branch/ CLP resolves:

• To support the junior doctors and NHS students, making links locally and visiting pickets lines and protests.
• [To support (LOCAL NHS CAMPAIGN)]
• To call on the party nationally to sharpen its stance on the NHS and clearly commit to reversing privatisation and marketisation and rebuilding a comprehensive, well funded publicly owned, run and provided NHS, based on meeting clinical need. Any integration of Health and Social care should be contingent on social care becoming a free, publicly funded and provided, service.
• To call on the party nationally to raise its profile on these issues, sending Jeremy Corbyn to address mass meetings on the NHS around the country and organising a national demonstration to save and rebuild the NHS.

Confessions of a confused socialist

It's a strange time to be active as a socialist in Britain. Hence, in part, the absence of much recent activity on this blog. I've written previously about my disquiet with the state of the left since Corbyn's welcome victory last autumn, and the uneasy feeling remains.

Back in December I think I saw the fundamental issue as being how we relate a bottom-up socialism that doesn't fetish parliament to the reality of a left-wing candidate having won the leadership of the Party. That is still at least of much of an issue as it was then. Fundamental questions have been asked: do we believe that capitalism is incompatible with human flourishing? If so, and if a socialist alternative is needed, how does a left-reformist Labour Party fit into with a strategy for moving in the direction of that alternative? Quite apart from this: what are we doing, individually, as a Labour left (organised in groups like Momentum and the LRC), and as the Labour Party to support the concrete grassroots opposition to Tory attacks? The junior doctors' strike is a prime example of something around which a good deal more organising should be happening

At the same time, of course, we can't ignore the reality of the Corbyn leadership, content in telling ourselves that the Labour Party or parliament don't really matter. If I believed that, I wouldn't be a Labour member; I won't bore you all on this Easter evening by rehearsing the reasons this is the case. The problem is precisely that these things matter, and that the left has, in an outcome slightly more antecedently improbable than Dapper Laughs turning out to be an expert in Jane Austen, won the leadership of the Labour Party. Its hold on this leadership is, however, at least as precarious as Laughs' actual grasp of Sense and Sensibility; if it loses that leadership, through pre-emptive backbench revolt or electoral failure, that will count against the intra-Labour left for years to come. "Your strategy has been tried and failed", the refrain will go, "now shut up, and listen to Dan Jarvis". And it may seem as though our critics would have a point.

The knives are being sharpened for Corbyn. Here's Jamie Reed's subtle Twitter account, for instance:

If the improbably named Rebel Alliance are not to have their way, the Party membership has to exert counter-pressure, making it clear to the PLP that we will not accept a coup. This will involve voicing our support to more sympathetic MPs, arguing the case with those who can be persuaded, and using mechanisms of accountability against those whose contempt for the membership is such that they want to reject last year's decisive leadership result. In this last respect, it is a serious tactical mistake for the leadership and elements of its organisational support to have downplayed talk of mandatory reselection. This is a basic democratic demand, whose time has come. Similarly, the present situation, where the left has the leadership and the membership without controlling the Party, is unsustainable. It's imperative that we organise to contest elections at CLP and other levels and, crucially, that we get Corbyn-supporting conference delegates sent this year: this conference will be a chance to consolidate his position, back left-wing policy, and set in motion democratic reform of the Party.

And the urgency of this task doesn't undo my initial point about not losing sight of the extra-parliamentary. There's a lot to be done.