Socialist Party Wales Socialism In Wales
By Ross Saunders
Boris Johnson’s response to the new coronavirus epidemic has been one of the most inept of all the leaders of the capitalist world. That the Welsh government, which could have taken a sharply contrasting independent line, instead followed in his footsteps as he lost his balance, makes a farce out of a tragedy. Wales should immediately and boldly strike out in a new direction and deploy socialist policies to confront the corona crisis.
“You cannot fight a fire blindfolded… test, test, test.” The advice of the director-general of the World Health Organisation for combatting coronavirus could not be clearer. But Welsh Labour Health Secretary Vaughan Gething has slavishly followed every contortion of Johnson’s policy, including on the key question of testing. Testing stations were opened (too late) in Wales for less than a week before they were shut down in obedience to Johnson’s declaration that the “contain” phase was over. Testing, we were told from both London and Cardiff, was useless in the “delay” phase, only to hear days later that Johnson has new plans for a massive increase in testing, as pressure built on him from workers angry at his government’s response.
Despite being told that they are “mission priority one”, health workers and care workers in Wales are still working with the public without knowing their infection status. Given the shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), it’s inevitable that some are being infected and are passing on the virus. Testing must be immediately increased to include all health workers, care workers, and people with Covid-19 symptoms, as well as those with whom they come into contact. Private health companies should not be allowed to make £2.4 million in a week selling testing kits that the NHS badly needs. They should be taken over by the NHS and the kits made available where needed, not for private profit.
Welsh schools were kept open alongside those in England, even as Ireland and most other European countries shut theirs. The real reason was that Johnson’s government was trying to avoid pressure to support the incomes of parents who were forced to stay home with their kids. Denmark, which has had some success containing the virus, closed its schools before ours, despite registering its first case of covid-19 a month after the disease appeared in the UK.
The Welsh government took no action to fill the gaping holes left in the support from the UK government for workers affected by the virus. Before Johnson imposed the lockdown, “presenteeism” accelerated its spread, as people felt compelled to turn up to work while infectious in order to pay their bills and keep a roof over their heads.
Reverse the NHS cuts – Save Royal Glamorgan A&E
Unfortunately, the failure to stand up for the interests of ordinary working-class people against Tory governments in Westminster is entirely in character with Labour’s approach to running Wales over the last decade.
Our NHS went into this crisis severely weakened in its ability to respond by a decade of austerity cuts made by Welsh Labour governments in obedience to Tory prime ministers. At its lowest point, a billion pounds of funding was cut from the Welsh NHS according to the Welsh Audit Office, meaning a massacre of jobs and beds. As we plunge into the corona virus crisis, funding is still lower than it was ten year ago. The Welsh Government could boost health worker morale by pledging now to scrap and reserve all cuts to services.
Incredibly, despite the obvious pressure, Gething is still refusing to rule out closing the 24-hour Accident and Emergency Department at Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, and to scrap the “South Wales Plan” in general, a blueprint developed in 2013 as a way of rationing A&E, maternity and other NHS services.
Bed occupancy rates are far in excess of the 85% maximum in most health boards in Wales, with the lowest number of beds in the Welsh NHS since records began. There is a shortage of critical care beds in particular, and all the equipment that goes with them. Plans to rig another 100 of these beds, to take the total up to 300 for all of Wales, will not come close to adequate for the 100s of 1000s of Coronavirus patients in Wales that could need intensive care according to some projections. There is an urgent need for the Welsh government to requisition the resources of all private healthcare companies in Wales – as the 900 NHS workers who signed an open letter to the Welsh government have demanded – and incorporate them permanently into the Welsh NHS.
Staff shortages are critical, and government efforts to plug the gap with workers who have left the NHS, retired or are still studying – or even those who have no experience in the health service – pose significant dangers to both workers and patients. Health workers have no confidence that the UK government, the Welsh government or health board managers will take the necessary steps to keep workers and patients safe.
With no lead being offered from the leadership of Unison and the other major health unions, individual workers and small groups are having to stand up for themselves and refuse to work in unsafe ways across the health service, some of them winning concessions from their bosses. But many are complying and putting themselves at risk. It is more important than ever that health unions assert the right of health workers to determine what is a safe way of working, and to resist pressure from bosses to cut corners.
In this crisis period, an emergency appeal should go out for new reps to come forward to keep their colleagues safe on the front-line and rebuild the unions in the workplace. Unions should have oversight over the manufacture and distribution of all safety equipment. In order to fill the staffing shortage permanently, the unions must fight to recover the pay that health workers have lost over the decade.
Cancel Cuts and Privatisation
Care services, likewise, must be brought back into the public sector, with councils taking over care homes and companies – many of them notorious for cutting corners in a way that would be fatal for service-users during the pandemic – that currently run home care services.
As usual, the contrast between the solidarity and willingness to sacrifice of working-class people and the cowardice of political leaders has shamed the latter. Mutual aid groups have sprung up in many communities to assist those who are most vulnerable to the virus, filling in the gaps that should have been bridged by public services provided by councils. Cuts to community services, social services, youth centres and play centres must be reversed to repair our support systems.
Incredibly Cardiff Council, for example, has announced that it is not capable of educating all the children of key workers, despite sitting on a cash pile of reserves over £100 million high, and having access to substantial powers to borrow more. Councils should spend this money to retain and repair services while a campaign is built demanding more funds centrally. The Welsh government should coordinate councils taking such a stand, and link them up with NHS boards, fire authorities and other organisations that deliver public services to ensure no jobs are lost and no services are cut back.
Councils should also act to tackle the housing shortage and overcrowding that is fuelling the spread of the virus, by using powers to take over the hundreds of houses left empty for long periods – some of them for a decade or more – as part of a massive increase in council housing. Johnson couldn’t even bring himself to concede a temporary ban on evictions from rented homes. The Welsh government should use its powers to go much further, and cancel rents throughout this crisis period, ensuring no worker is driven to work while ill, by suspending the licences of landlords who refuse to comply.
An Emergency Plan of Production
Many health workers look at the weaknesses in the health service, the shortage of trained staff, basic safety equipment and specialist machinery like ventilators, and despair of the ability to meet the challenge the new corona virus poses. One Unite member in Cardiff report that NHS workers in the community have cleared out hardware stores in the city of all kinds of masks in the desperate attempt to ensure their own safety.
But our ability to respond is limited not by the virus itself, but by the fact that the majority of society’s resources are controlled not democratically by ordinary working-class people, but by a tiny minority of the rich. Appeals have gone out to companies to make new ventilators, but we are taking too big a risk relying on capitalists calculating that they can make a profit out of the crisis. We can only secure a guarantee that we will have what we need to respond to the crisis if we take control of production.
The Welsh government should guarantee that enough gloves, masks, visors, gowns and ventilators will be available by nationalising companies capable of producing these items. We can meet the economic storm that will follow the pandemic by building on that step, taking over the biggest companies that run our economy and linking them up in a plan of production that would guarantee the working class everything it needs.
