Motion for TUC

Please pass this motion in your union branch, campaign group, trades council, patients' organisation, or any other grouping that you can think of, that wants the TUC to call a national demonstration in defence of the NHS. Then send it to:

Brendan Barber
c/o Congress House
Great Russell Street
London
WC1B 3LS

Also, drop us a line at save-our-nhs@hotmail.co.uk: it'd be nice to keep track of how many motions are getting sent in.

National Demo to Defend the NHS

The NHS is under attack. Nationally, health workers are being ordered to take £20bn worth of cuts in services. Now, the government’s Health and Social Care Bill has been passed which will see the break up and privatisation of the NHS.

There has been widespread opposition to the cuts and privatisation in the NHS. We are calling on the Trades Union Congress to call and build for a mass demonstration on 30th June 2012, on the scale of the enormous anti-cuts demonstration on 26th March 2011, as a step to building a campaign involving health workers, their unions, service users and the public to force the Coalition to back down.

When the NHS was first founded, it came about as a result of massive public pressure. Now we have fight in order to keep a truly publicly owned and funded National Health Service capable of providing high quality care for all.

Why we started this blog.

At our local anti-cuts group meeting last week, the subject on the NHS came up on the agenda. Many local activists expressed their horror at the ConDems plans, but when it came to the question of what can we actually do about it, a silence fell. Then came the suggestion of building a campaign, calling on the TUC to call and build for a national demo in defence of the health service.

So we agreed, to send out this motion to every trade union branch, trades council, anti-cuts campaign, patient support group and community organisation we could, asking them to pass it and send it in to the Trade Union Congress headquarters.

As a young health worker, what has angered me as much as the government’s plans to break up and privatise the NHS has been the hang ringing attitude of the union leaders. The NHS wasn't benevolently gifted us, it was a service that we had to fight for. Now is not the time for eulogising it, now is the time for the TUC which unites unions representing 6.5million workers, to take action, to call and build for a massive national demonstration as a step towards building a campaign to force the government to back down.