The Spirit of '45 Page #9

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I thought one of the biggest disasters

was the selling off of council houses.

We all lived in crofts and avenues.

Nice houses, all, you know,

close to where you were working

on top of the docks in Birkenhead

where I lived.

But they were good houses, good houses.

And the people there were decent people,

good people, good neighbourhoods.

We're looking after

the people in Liverpool now.

Everyone else has deserted us

so well look after our own.

We are disgusted over it,

that that union is throwing

the towel in, and we're not.

We're not going to throw the towel in

yet, until we get a proper deal.

There's no such thing

as registered dockers now.

Anyone goes on them docks now,

they're just going there,

doing a job and then getting chased.

So that's it.

It's soul-destroying.

The situation we have now, you've got

maybe two generations in the family

who've never, never been in employment.

Because of the nature

of the trade union Labour leadership,

they've virtually capitulated.

There's been no serious opposition.

The miners were left in isolation.

The dockers were left in isolation

when they fought their last struggle

in the '90s.

And the trade union laws

prevent the trade unions

organising collectively

against political decisions.

Now, as far as I'm concerned,

the TUC should say, "Well,

we're not interested in your laws."

"Let's organise and defeat

these people." That hasn't happened.

When you start a debate,

'Will we be able to build the next stage

of massive power stations?",

I don't believe that the current

companies, one, can afford it,

and have got the ability

to actually coordinate and plan it.

They are all competing with each other

across the whole country.

They can't sit down and actually say,

"We need one power station in Scotland,

or, "We need a supplementary power

station in the east coast of Britain."

I think that's where

the historical planning of one body

that was responsible for the production

of electricity planning could deliver.

Within three or four years,

that had developed

into an absolute farce

and then a tragedy

with repeated fatalities,

large-scale loss of life

in a number of different train crashes.

Effectively in 2002, the government

was forced to step in

and take the infrastructure company,

Railtrack, back into administration,

because it had gone bust.

There's this huge and complex web

of financial debate,

argument and blame and recrimination

that goes round and round and round,

every week of every year under

the privatised railway in this country,

and it's a nonsense.

People were proud to be a railwayman.

Very, very proud to be a railwayman.

There was a public-service ethos

which was passed on to new people

who started in the industry.

Now, what happened after privatisation

is that a deliberate

and concerted attempt has been made

to erase that history

within the railway workers.

So, for example, somebody recruited

to work on the railway today

isn't even taught to think of themselves

as a railway worker.

We're losing an industry

that we invented in this country

and which people love

and which young people need.

I mean, we've got a million young people

unemployed in Britain today.

A million young people unemployed.

They should be being employed,

some of them at least,

learning how lo do railway engineering

skills, railway operational skills,

to deliver the kind of services

that this country needs

in order to develop a new, green

public transport system.

In 2003,

the market was liberalised.

Other companies could come in

and collect mail from businesses

who are posting it, sort it,

then pass it on to Royal Mail

to deliver. What that has done

is it's undermined Royal Mail's capacity

to provide a universal service

which is subsidised

by business postings.

The cost of the universal service

for everybody

is no longer supported to that degree

by what businesses do.

In simple terms,

people used to get their mail earlier.

Now they get it later.

They used to have two deliveries.

Now they get one per day.

The reform of the health service

is, of course,

to bring it back into the marketplace

and degrade it back again

into making healthcare a commodity.

So it's not reform at all.

It started when Margaret Thatcher

started contracting out domestics

and porters and laundry services.

Again just the process of administering,

asking people to bid for contracts

costs money in and of itself

to write the contract for what you want

rather than just have domestics

doing the cleaning.

But then to win the contract,

you have to put the cheapest bid in.

So, the ward I worked on at the time,

we had two full-time cleaners on

in the morning

and a part-time cleaner on

in the evening.

When I finished at the hospital,

they had a half a cleaner on

in the morning

and then one between about ten wards

in the evening.

It wasn't cheaper

when people get MRSA and infections

which then might cost the whole

of what you've saved on the contract

on one person

if they're in intensive care.

I mean, there was a real feeling of

ownership about the NHS when it started.

People felt they were

doing it themselves,

that it was their possession.

And they've lost that.

So, the cost of running

the health service,

the admin cost, was about six percent

before that started.

Then they moved up to about 12 percent.

Now they're heading in the direction

of American costs

for running the health service,

anything between 18, 20, 25 percent.

You can see the politicians have chosen

to waste a huge amount of money

on marketising the service.

I've got a big picture of Aneurin Bevan

I looked at every day.

I think, "Where are the people?"

And What he says is,

"All the time the people

have got the faith to fight for it."

We've been out on the streets and people

said, "They'll never privatise the NHS."

'Why are you getting so up the wall?

They won't do that."

And people just didn't believe

they would do it.

It seems to me

there's a sort of blindness

to the enormous advances

that have been made in British medicine

as a result of the NHS.

I mean, there are many things

that have taught the rest of the world

so far as the NHS was concerned.

This was a very inventive organisation

with lots of new initiatives.

I do hope

we don't go down the American system

whereby the first thing you met,

as you come in with broken legs

or whatever,

is someone with a clipboard

who says, "Are you insured?"

When there's money there,

the private sector is happy to be there

taking the cash, thank you,

and paying its shareholders.

When the money isn't there, as we saw

locally after only a couple of years

of involvement in primary care,

they were off.

People are ready to defend

the National Health Service.

They do know about it.

They do know the rewards of it.

They do know about the care

and the treatment they get.

They're all going there every day.

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