Thousands of people march through London to protest against underfunding and privatisation of the NHS.
Credit: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft
My life was saved last year by the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skilful procedure to remove a cancer from my body. Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from the floor. I’ve just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff had objected to a decision by the National Health Service to privatise the hospital’s cancer scanning. They complained that the scanners the private company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital’s own machines. Privatisation, they said, would put patients at risk. In response, as the Guardian revealed last week, NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel if its staff continued to criticise the decision.
The dominant system of political thought in […]
20 years ago in ON, I attended a lecture by the then U of Guelph philosophy prof, Dr. John McMurtry. He had just written a book called The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. He discussed how education and health were trillion-dollar human endeavours worldwide, how the elite wanted access to that money.
Today we see this working out stateside with the push for private schools by Devos, the cutting of health services here in Canada at every level of government and the wholesale near dismantling of the system in the UK.
Indeed, “they will kill us all unless we overthrow them” is even apter as each day arrives.
If we cannot even make up our own minds and complain about the situations we are forced to live under, then we are nothing but slaves.