Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials, 12 December 2006

This Monday the BBC reported that the NHS will be asked to make a £250m surplus. But how on earth will the NHS make this "surplus"? Or even balance its books by March 2008, as Health secretary Hewitt claims?

Especially when the picture today is of 103 Hospital Trusts in the red, 13 of these bankrupt and a £1.6bn predicted deficit? Over 21,000 NHS jobs have disappeared since February.

So will the profits of the private health sector now be counted as "NHS" surplus? Because NHS bosses are at present forcing doctors to refer patients to private centres for treatment. NHS Trusts are to be told that by March 2008, 85% of inpatients must receive treatment within 18 months. Yet, on top of the reduction in NHS staff, under the guise of "reconfiguration", there is an ongoing programme of closures of A&E units, downgrading of maternity and paediatric provision in district hospitals, ward closures and even the closure of whole local hospitals! So where will patients get treatment, except in private centres?

Two weeks ago, Blair himself said that patients would just have to get used to travelling further for their emergency and specialist care! What is more, he had the nerve to claim that this would allow patients to get scans and clot-busting drugs for strokes, which are not available in local A&Es!

So fewer facilities will be better? Even if the obvious question which Blair should be answering is why such basic emergency investigations and treatments are not already available in all A&E departments? As anyone knows, after waiting hours in A&E to be seen, it is not as if there are too many A&E facilities as it is! In fact simply upgrading existing facilities would improve things! But that is not on the agenda. Thanks to even more cuts and closures, if patients are to receive treatment at all, it will be in private treatment centres seeking to make a profit on NHS funds.

The "record investment" in the NHS was always meant to be diverted to the private sector and that is where it went. As if the fancy new buildings built under PFI can somehow take care of the sick, while infection rates soar, and staff are sacked!

This attack on the NHS is unprecedented. It highlights, once more, the dire need for a concerted fight against all of this government's pro-business, anti-working class policies. But in this case, it is also a fight for our lives.

Predictably, Thatcher was "deeply saddened" by the death of her old friend, the former Chilean dictator, Pinochet, who died in the best comfort that money can buy in his own country.

Pinochet was not just a retired dictator. He was responsible for the murder of a generation of political and union activists in Chile. After his coup, in 1973, the country's working class districts were raided by the army and tens of thousands were herded into stadiums. Many were machine-gunned, others died under torture or "disappeared" in the jails of the new regime. Few survived this terror.

Subsequently, Pinochet conspired with other dictators in "Operation Condor" - sending death squads to murder South American political refugees across the world. And for the following 17 years, the Chilean working class remained strangled by a regime of systematic torture and assassinations.

For the main foreign investors in Chile, Britain and the US, Pinochet was a godsend. His regime crushed the working class resistance in Chile's mines and factories. The City's big shareholders were reassured: the massive profits which had been flowing out of Chile would no longer be threatened by the militancy of its workers.

When push came to shove, during the Falklands War, the Chilean dictator gave more proof of his loyalty to Western capital, by supporting Thatcher's claim on a territory over which, clearly, Britain had no rights whatsoever.

Thatcher was not alone in showing respect for Pinochet. When he was arrested on his arrival in Britain, in 1998, under an international warrant issued by a Spanish court, then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, did not put him in Harmondsworth detention centre, as an "undesirable immigrant". He enjoyed the royal luxury of Wentworth Estate, before being allowed to return freely to Chile!

Pinochet may have been known as the "butcher of Santiago" in his own country, he may have been a terrorist against his own population, but he always toed the line of capitalist interests. And that was good enough for a Labour government which falls over backwards to please the City.