Socialist Voice interview Larry Bowles.
Larry Bowles is a Unite Safety Representative and Shop Steward at Broad Green Hospital where he has worked for 40 years. He is a member of the joint Shop Stewards Committee for the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust that includes Unite, Unison, GMB, Society of Radiographers and the Physiotherapist union and also a delegate to Liverpool TUC .
SV: What are the feelings amongst workers about the November 30 strike and the fight against NHS privatisation?
We have organised six demonstrations this year outside the Royal Hospital to fight the proposed privatization changes by the government. We want all the staff to come to our future demonstrations and support the November 30 strike over pensions. Not all staff feel the pain of what will come, but they will. They want us to pay more in pension contributions and to receive less in pension payments.
Psychologically this is devastating to our members. The newspapers are talking about gold plated pensions but that is just propaganda, in fact many do not pay a great deal and they may be taken away in any case. These are pensions that we have paid into for all our lives. The real gold-plated pensions are paid to Ministers, bankers and the establishment.
The strike will represent the feelings of our membership over pensions, cuts, PFI and privatised restructuring. The strike will not put patients at risk and if there are life threatening situations they will be dealt with.
Of course if there is privatisation, companies will be able to change our pension scheme. After 90 days they will change our shifts and our pay and overtime. New starters will have a different pension schemes.
I want to thank the Liverpool Trade Union Council and Keep Our NHS Public and all the support we receive for our demonstrations at the Royal hospital.
SV: What has privatisation done and what is threatened?
Since Thatcher in the 1980s they have wanted to privatise. When she came to power they went for the non-clinical services: cleaning and portering, and introduced compulsory competitive tendering.
We fought against that privatisation, but we had to tender in order to compete for the bids. However all our tenders were lost and those that won were based on reduced bonuses and holidays, and pensions were frozen. Since then there have been five different private companies and pay rates have been cut right down. This meant for example that the hospital laundry service, which was a great service, very efficient, where it was a hard but good place to work, was closed down and all laundry is now done in Blackpool not in Liverpool.
Car parks are now privatised, they want you to pay for visiting a sick person and to go to work. Vinchy, a French multinational company, is one firm that is running car parks. Privatisation also continued with maintenance. Now they want to use competitive tendering for blood services, the blood transfusion service will go if we don’t stop their plans. They want to amalgamate Aintree and the Royal Hospital blood services, so that anyone who deals with the blood services, will be put into one unit. This will make it much easier to privatise and then our blood will be controlled by private laboratories.
Privatising blood transfusion and blood services shows there is no end to it, as all services are being turned to the market. The origins of the NHS in 1945 were not based on privatised services and it became the biggest non-profit organisation as well as the biggest employer in the country.
Big business and governments could see they could turn the NHS into a market, in order to make profit and what was getting up their nose was that they knew they could create a market but they could not get their hands on it.
Eventually under successive governments the market was introduced. Now the Tories are going for everything and the firms that are lobbying them and beginning to run parts of the NHS have vested interests. Hospitals are and will be run like businesses which is against the principal of health. Hospitals are there to make sick people better, not to make a profit.
As far as I am concerned, as a public service the NHS gives the best care in the world. But over the next two years all that will change because of capitalism.
They got here by all the ‘reorganisations’ over many years. There needed to be more accountability but these plans and previous reorganisations have made that worse not better. I don’t think the privatised services are cheaper or better than before.
What impact does PFI have on the NHS?
The PFI schemes are new builds but the costs are very high and paid over decades which means the payments will be impossible to maintain. There are empty buildings that the NHS had built but could not fill or they could not use, but will be paying for empty buildings over decades. No doubt the Royal will be added to the list of those hospitals that will not be able to keep up their payments because the PFI scheme to build a new Royal Liverpool hospital has been approved.
SV: What is your attitude to the Labour Party?
When Labour won the 1997election there were shouts of joy from NHS staff, it was like the cavalry had come to save us. You’ve seen the movies haven’t you! The Labour government did put more money into the NHS than any other government. And contrary to what people believe, the health service in parts did flourish under Labour. But because of capitalist leanings, the Blair government developed the Private Finance Initiative. And even ourselves, we had to win a tender to ward off privatisation. So much for the cavalry. We’d have been better with the unions. Ed Balls has told us that we are playing into the Tories hands by striking. We should remind Labour MPs what banner they should be standing behind, the trade union banners and the banners of working class struggle.
In the past the only party for me was the Labour Party and I was a Labour Party supporter. The Labour Party has buried its history and is only interested in votes, they are not representing the fight for pensions. They have some good people in the Labour Party but Labour leaders do not represent me. The unions voted Ed Miliband into the leadership of the Labour Party but he does not represent the ideals of what unions are fighting for because he is not representing the interests of the unions.
