With undisguised relish the ruling class is putting forward its plans for cuts in the public sector. The Financial Times in particular -adviser and voice ur the ruling class - has been running a series entitled Public Expenditure: Can it be cut? If so, where and how?' The article on 24 June spelt it out: "The most important immediate need in cutting social service expenditure is a proper resis+ tance to wage pressures'. Bemoaning what it calls 'hideously expensive' wage rounds in the National Health Service, it makes it quite clear that the solution is to depress even furhave likewise remained frozen and dental charges were last put up in 1973. He even quotes some unnamed 'socialists' who see a hospital "hotel" charge - with exemptions as for prescriptions - as unobjectionable'. Others - socialists? - he claims toy with a charge for road or industrial accidents.
So the answers are there - keep wages down, introduce a means test, and bang up the charges as well as introducing some new ones.
Certainly Mr Rogaly can hardly complain at Harold Wilson's performance in clamping down on the NHS. In 1974 that staid and conservative body the BMA told Wilson: *Five hundred million pounds is needed to nut the that at the Buckland Hospital at Dover, which has an orthopaedic department divided in two by the hospital's main corridor. Peace for the patients is disturbed by the noise and clatter of hospital waily life going backwards and tor wards through the ward. wheeled through on their way to the mortuary.
Of the Oldham General Hospital - à rambling building over 100 years old - NUPE official Colin Barnett says: "The hospital Is permeated with the filth of ages. Explaining the hospital's plague of disease-carrying cockroaches he says: 'Meanwhile as long as the hospital is starved of money there will be cockroaches crawling around every where.' SHORTAGES Staff shortages get worse by the day. One Health workers' union, COHSE, estimates that there is a shortage of 70,000 nurses because they are so badly paie. Plymouth, with a population of 399,000, is 454 nurses understaffed Any out-patient in the town can expect to wait for up to 100 weeks.
A delegate to this week's BMA Conference bitterly summed up the state of the NHS: