BRIGHTON, England, 11 September 2003 — British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be “driving a dagger” through the National Health Service if he insists on pressing ahead with far-reaching health care reforms, Britain’s increasingly disillusioned labor movement said yesterday.
Plans to establish autonomous “foundation hospitals” are a major bone of contention at the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress, which wraps up today in Brighton, on England’s south coast. “NHS workers have gone through 17 reorganizations in as many years, but not one as ill thought out as the Bill now before Parliament,” said Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, Britain’s biggest union.
“Transforming successful hospitals into foundation hospitals is a risky experiment creating at best a two-tier health service and at worst a staging post to privatization,” he said. Set up in 1948, and entirely taxpayer funded, the NHS is Europe’s single biggest organization with one million employees and a budget of more than 50 billion pounds ($80 billion, 70 billion euros) a year.
But it is badly understaffed and underfunded, leading Blair to propose that selected NHS hospitals be given “foundation” status, allowing them to set staff wages and attract outside finance. Labor unions are dead set against the reforms, saying it will create a two-tier health care system in Britain by compromising the bedrock NHS principle of free care for all. Blair dined in Brighton on Tuesday with the TUC’s governing council, where according to participants he dropped tough talk from a prepared speech warning against a Labour Party return to old-school socialism.