Whipps Cross Hospital holds a special place in the hearts of the Mac Uaid clan. My niece was born there and they managed to puncture my sister in law’s bowel in the process. She did try and explain some of the details but since I can’t bear to listen to an account of any medical procedure more serious than nail clipping I just put my fingers in my ears and hummed while she was talking. There was a demonstration to defend the hospital yesterday. I had intended to go but the eastbound tube wasn’t working. So thanks to George for this guest posting about the demo. George hangs with the Permanent Revolution massive who are now in a popular front with Iain Duncan Smith . Well that’s what Jeremy from Workers’ Power said. George slightly exceeded his 300 word brief. These photos are nicked from Miranda Grell’s site. She is a Labour councillor in the area.

No doubt London’s left-leaning restaurant goers will express their gratitude in due course to your usual correspondent for his selfless work in discovering and exposing the capital’s “worst Italian” restaurant. My commiserations to Liam at his gastronomic disaster in the West End.

Earlier that same day upwards of 1,000 healthworkers and local residents marched through the streets of the east London borough of Waltham Forest. They had come out amid what in a more innocent age we might have called an unseasonably warm February day to protest against the threat to dismantle most of their local hospital, Whipps Cross. NHS bosses are currently considering proposals to downgrade what is a 650-bed general hospital, serving a local population of some 350,000, into an emergency-only centre.

The Whipps Cross management have already been wielding the axe in a desperate attempt to resolve a funding crisis. Seventy staff face redundancy, with some 400 posts under threat. Three wards have closed in the past few months against the background of a 27 million quid deficit. At the same time, the demand for beds at the facility has reached its highest level in seven years.

Meanwhile, a new hospital has opened down the road in Romford, Essex at price tag of 238 million. The Queens (somehow I don’t think she will be spending a night in casualty) Hospital was built – you guessed it – under the Private Finance Initiative. Effectively, the local NHS trust rents back the hospital from a consortium of private corporations at a starting rate of 36 million a year for 30 years. But the trust is already operating at a cumulative debt of well over 43 million. In short Queens Hospital in Romford has to operate at or above capacity to begin to bridge the gap, whatever the consequences for Whipps Cross or the King George Hospital in nearby Ilford.

And that brings us to the crux of the matter – NHS staff, patients and the “taxpayer” are picking up the tab for an enormous state subsidy to private capital with rates of return three to four times above the average for the construction industry.

By the way, I can rattle off the figures cited above not because I know John Lister and Geoff Martin of Health Emergency fame, but thanks to the very informative four-page bulletin produced for the 3 February demonstration by the “Save Whipps Cross Hospital Campaign” (visit http://www.savewhippscross.org/). Its bulletin illustrated the real strength of a locally rooted campaign, which clearly has the able support of articulate professionals who can bat down the arguments thrown at them by the senior management of NHS London and the local Primary Care Trusts.

The campaign has also pulled together quite a diverse array of forces from the local anarchists, the Socialist Party (which is unusually strong in the immediate vicinity), the SWP/Respect and the Labour Party across the constituencies in the borough (I even clocked the banner from Leyton & Wanstead constituency). Even the local Tories have felt obliged – or sufficiently immune to allegations of cynical opportunism – to jump on the bandwagon. I was sorely disappointed by the crowd’s civility on Saturday towards local MP, Ian Duncan Smith, though quite understandably most had probably missed his stint as leader of the Conservative Party.

My point here is not, however, to decry the “popular frontist” nature of the campaign, but to point to a crucial weakness. Despite the impressive turnout and the diversity of the demonstrators, there was a glaring absence – namely the unions that organise in the hospitals and above all UNISON. Surely, with members’ jobs on the line and in the wake of a successful pay battle by cleaners and other ancillary workers employed by a private corporation under contract to the hospital, UNISON branches from across north and east London should have been present in force. Alas, they were not.

And I’m afraid that UNISON’s pitifully low visibility at the Whipps Cross demonstration reflects what was happened in much of the rest of the country, where inspired and inspiring local campaigns have sprung up against cuts and closures but where the crucial ingredient of industrial action has been missing. There are numerous reasons for this including the weakened state of union organisation across much of the NHS, but even where healthworkers have shown a willingness to strike against cuts as in the case of community mental health staff in Manchester, the UNISON leadership has been at best reluctant to offer official backing.

Indeed, UNISON within the TUC’s “NHS Together” campaign (what’s that?, you may well ask) has argued vociferously against a national demonstration on 3 March and in many parts of the country it appears reluctant to pursue anything more radical than lobbying of MPs and token leafleting sessions in city and town centres. Presumably, the union bureaucracy’s approach will ensure that the path to the coronation of Gordon Brown as Labour leader is strewn with still more NHS job losses, ward and hospital closures, and, of course, debts to private consortia.

* By the way for those in the vicinity the week ahead offers the chance to check out what the left in various forms has to offer. On Wednesday 7 February (7.30 PM) the would-be left contender for the Labour Party leadership, John McDonnell appears at the Welsh Church in Leytonstone High Road, E11 along with local MP, Harry Cohen. On Friday night the 9^th Bethnal Green’s very own, George Galloway MP, ventures further east to al Badr Hall in Lea Bridge Road to thump the tub for Respect. Kick-off is at the slightly earlier time of 6.30 PM. Finally, the Walthamsto
w Anarchist Group has called a protest for next Saturday (10 February) linking the issue of NHS cuts to the Iraq war – demonstrate from 2.00 PM outside the Territorial Army barracks on Lea Bridge Road.