UCH – savaged not saved (1994)

This was a leaflet I wrote with M from the Campaign for Real Life in 1994. I reproduce it here because it shows the danger of trying to do anything with those in political parties – in this case the SWP, though it’s applicable to any party. A female anarchist friend was easily manipulated by them because one of the SWP female nurses, a shop steward for the union, was nice and charming. But they fucked the occupation over.

It’s reproduced in this very long text on the occupation of parts of the UCH hospital in 1992 and 1993

 

The SWP – doing Bottomley’s dirty work for her:

Q: What have Virginia Bottomley and the SWP got in common?

A: Amongst other things, they both claim that University College Hospital (UCH) has been saved.

About 700 jobs and hundreds of beds have been lost, and the main Cruciform building – which everyone associated with UCH – has been closed. Yet for different, equally-manipulative reasons, the “Health” Minister and the “Socialist” Workers’ Party are both agreed on the lie that “UCH has been saved”. Goebells – “The bigger the lie, the more it is believed” – would have been proud.

What’s left of UCH?

UCH – SAVAGED

Well – now merged with the Middlesex, there’s the administration – really useful if you’ve had a heart attack. And there the Accident & Emergency – but that was never scheduled for closure in the first place. Instead, as with all A & E’s without a hospital attached, it’s been left without adequate back-up, giving patients just 48 hours to stay before being moved on. There are, however, 40 or so extra beds for those who need intensive care, who can now stay on a bit longer. Nevertheless, staff are now complaining that whereas before it used to take just a couple of minutes to move such patients to a specialist ward in the old Cruciform building, now it takes up to half an hour to get to the Middlesex because of heavy traffic. What’s more, the recent death of a six-month-old baby at UCH A&E shows how dangerous it is to have an A&E separate from the specialists (now based in Middlesex) who were previously on site; at the same time the cuts ensured that the equipment for monitoring the baby wasn’t working. It looks like the parents are going to sue the over-worked nurses involved, using the Patients’ Charter. The much-lauded Charter is used intentionally to blame individual health workers in order to fend off attacks on the real murderers: the managers and accountants who push through the cuts demanded by Bottomley and her genocidal government.

Apart from this, there’s a private wing (great!). Also “saved” (we’re not sure they were planning it for closure originally anyway) are the Urology department (much reduced), the clap clinic and Obstetrics. And there’s a new children’s ward: however, at the Middlesex there used to be two children’s wards, and now there’s only one – which means that between them, one children’s ward has been lost, even though on paper UCH’s has been “saved”. Similarly, by classifying some beds which were previously the Middlesex’s, and by counting the beds existing towards the end of the run-down of the UCH, the health authorities can claim that UCH has lost “only” 70 beds instead of the 300+ that have really been lost. Lies, damned lies and statistics. Moreover, three weeks after Bottomley said the UCH had been saved, it was announced that the latest plan was to sell off the whole UCH site (the land fetching millions on the property market) and to move parts of the UCH to various other hospitals. If this comes about UCH will merely be an administrative label on some bureaucrat’s door.

To say all this means the hospital has been saved is like saying that a formerly healthy adults, who has had both legs and arms amputated and is on a life support machine, has been saved. Well, technically yes – but it hardly constitutes the victory the SWP like to make it out to be.

With saviours like these, who needs grave-diggers?

During the Vietnam war, an American general declared, “In order to save the village, it had to be destroyed.” With UCH it’s more a case of “in order to destroy the hospital, it had to look like it was saved.”

Virginia Bottomley says the UCH has been saved, for similar reasons to the government saving coal mines in 1992 – to stop people fighting together, to reinforce the ignorance and confusion about what’s happening to the hospitals and to divide up the fight to save them into isolated campaigns for each hospital, separated from a more general movement.

But why does the SWP proclaim “We saved UCH” when those SWP members who have worked and struggled at UCH – some of whom are genuinely fighting to win – know perfectly well this is bullshit? As in all hierarchies, the individual has to repress their point of view and preach “the party line”. During the strike, SWP strategy was designed to gain the maximum publicity and to show how radical they were compared to the union leadership, by pushing for demands that they knew the leaders would not meet. The predictable sell-out of the strike by Unison was the “victory” the SWP wanted: confirmation of something they knew beforehand would happen; but did nothing to undermine. In fact, they had encouraged a faith in the union which they knew would inevitably be betrayed. It was only afterwards that they needed to find a happy ending, so that they could encourage others to repeat the tragedy at other hospitals. The SWP’s main concern was recruitment to a self-proclaimed image of themselves heroically and successfully leading the working class to victory, even if this victory is a myth. For them this is more vital than the development of any real struggle by the poor, honestly facing the horrific extent of their defeats and the reasons for them.

The struggles at UCH

During the struggles at UCH the SWP did everything to minimise the efforts of non-SWP members. During the work-in aimed at stopping the closure of Ward 2/1 in Nov – Dec ’92, SWP members played as much a part as anyone else involved in the struggle – though it was probably the support of the junior doctors which really won this battle, admittedly only a temporary reprieve. In the strike of Aug – Sept ’93 they played a more significant part – not all of it helpful by any means. For instance, they did much to ensure that the cheerful demos which had previously disrupted traffic got turned into boring routine affairs. And in the occupation of Ward 2/3 in September, admittedly suggested by an SWP member, though broken into by a non-party hospital campaigner, they did much to dampen the high-spirited atmosphere. When occupiers met with a few SWP union stewards to discuss the occupation, the occupiers were told the stewards represented the decisions of the strike committee, and these decisions were: vetting to decide who should be allowed into the occupation, to be carried out by the branch secretary and chair, both SWP members. People would have to book themselves onto a formalised rota days in advance just to be able to spend a night there, reducing the occupation to a chore and duty, killing off the social dynamic going on. The effect of these changes was miserable: a lot of people, particularly locals who visited regularly, were put off from coming. And there seemed little point in giving out leaflets encouraging people to come, if they had to be vetted first. People now felt they were only there with the tolerance of certain officials, and no longer joint partners in the struggle.

The openness of the occupation; with free debate flowing back and forth informally, was replaced with an atmosphere of intrigue and secret whispering. It was only later found out that these demands of the SWP union officials weren’t at all proposed by the strike committee: it had been an SWP manipulation from the very beginning.

The second occupation of Ward 2/3 was organised by us – UCH Community Action Committee – without, unfortunately, a strike at UCH, and completely independently of any political party. We had hoped to extend the occupation of one ward by getting loads of people back from a TUC Health Service demo on November 20th. We failed, even though the occupation took nearly three weeks to be evicted. During this time, the SWP were even less supportive than the rest of the media – the occupation only got a mention after the evictions. We could never, of course, pretend that “we saved UCH” – not just because it hasn’t been saved but, more vitally, because if UCH had been saved it could not have been down to us, but due to a more general and much more combative movement, involving a considerably greater section of the working class than the few people who initiated the occupation. Unlike the SWP, we have no pretension to being an indispensable vanguard, able to win victories on our own. And, of course, UCH has been, by and large, a defeat, and to ignore that is to confuse and demoralise any chance of a fightback, which is where the SWP and Bottomley have so much in common.

If a fight is to develop to save the hospitals or to stop the horrific attacks on the poor, it will not only have to bypass the parties and unions, but attack them as enemies and obstacles to our struggle. Our health and our lives cannot be “save” by the professional liars of the Left, Right or Centre, but only ourselves organising not just an organisation with a name on a banner or logo on a leaflet, which is just an image, but organising specific actions and critiques, correcting our weaknesses and failures.

UCH Community Action Committee, c/o BM CRL, London WC1N 3XX

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.