other areas, they will remain until such facilities have been built.
Encouraged by this abject capitulation of Wilson and Castle, the consultants are now preparing for the next round.
Over the past two weeks the British Medical Association BMA) and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) have been balloting the 12,000 consultants over their recommendation that consultants should resign from the NHS. In the light of their past record, it is extremely likely that the consultants will vote for such mass resignations from the NHS.
At the same time, it is also becoming clear that the consultants have succeeded in another of their aims. Their cynical manipulation of the struggle of junior hospital doctors (JHDs) for improved working hours and pay has duped at least some of them into supporting the consultants' antiNHS fight. The Junior Hospital Doctors Association (JHDA) has already instructed its members not to work with any doctor who replaces a resigned consultant.
Inadequate With the NHS in the worst crisis of its history and facing Healey's even bloodier axe, a further victory for private practice will open the gates to the rapid growth of private medicine and the development of a two-tier health service. responsibility for this run-down of the NHS lies firmly with the Labour leadership.
The response of the labour movement has so far been very inadequate. The failure to give active support to the justified demands of the JHDs on the clear basis of a fight in defence of the NHS against the £6 limit, and against private practice, is one of the succeeded in drawing the JHDs into.a close alliance in their struggle against the NHS.
What is crucial is that health workers and other sections of the labour movement begin to At the end of last year the consultants won the first round in their fight to stop private practice from being separated from the NHS. The Labour Government agreed that pay beds will only be phased out in areas which already have adequate private facilities outside the health service. In prepare now to fight the consultants acuons with private practice bans, elected committees to run hospitals should the consultants resign, solidarity strike action in defence of the NHS, etc.
The demonstration called by the National Coordinating Committee Against the Cuts in the NHS and NALGO (date yet to be fixed) can also provide a focus to build a massive campaign to throw back these attacks.
National Health under the control .. a health service responsive to the needs of working people.
Bulletin of NCC, 5p plus p&p from: Dr Paul Stern, 55 Bridge Lane, London NW1. .....'a health service of working people?