RK on social media wrote (with a little editing):
An item on the news, said that teacher assistants were increasingly being used to teach full classes, some up to 30+ hours. PCSO staff are taking over much more of the standard police work and someone I know has just left a job taking bloods on wards, after little training, left alone to do the job on her own… and paid the same wage as a hospital porter.
I believe that by stealth, fully trained, higher waged professionals and semi professionals are being weeded out of many working environments.
Perhaps (just as nurses are taking over some doctor tasks) we will eventually only find the fully qualified in executive positions and barely trained, poorly paid staff will be undertaking most of the work.
Is this part of Hunt’s plans for the NHS, with doctors supervising a collection of underpaid individuals to deliver our health service?
We are fast heading to a worker bee situation, where cost cutting determines a very basic Health Care, Education and security for the masses except for those that can afford to pay. The rich will have the very best of care, education and security… further dividing an already horrendously divided nation.
This constant undermining of skills has been happening in industry for decades, where apprenticeships have ended and Mickey Mouse schemes qualify someone in a trade, after a six week course in a tech college.
It’s the bottom line that always matters most under capitalism. Skill, pride in workmanship, ethical standards of delivery, knowledge of the tasks, are all obstacles in the way of maximising profit. Perhaps that’s why we have so little of our industrial base left.
The argument is always: ” If we can’t be competitive, then we will take our manufacturing abroad to the third world”.
They can’t do that with health, welfare and education, so it has to be de-skilled to make it competitive. It’s also an attack on organised Labour, good pension schemes and secure employment. We all have to live in fear of the sack, or a wage freeze or as Public sector workers have long known, the gradual drip of outside tendering, ripping up of service agreements and eventual wage cuts and overtime payments.
While the working population is under increasing attack, there is a mirror image… one of unbridled growth in profits, bonuses and executive pay, for those that are ruining our nation.
I fully recognize the point RK is making and I think most of us could add even more examples of de-skilling of the workforce, whether in the public or private sector. However, he specifically puts the question:
Is this part of Hunt’s plans for the NHS, with doctors supervising a collection of underpaid individuals to deliver our health service?
Dr Bob Gill provides an answer:
The reality is that more qualified staff are being driven out in preparation for the de-skilling that is always part of healthcare privatisation and corporate takeover. For the UK, this is mapped out in the Five Year Forward View by Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England. Stevens used to be an executive of the US based private health care company, UnitedHealth.
Motions at the BMA conference raised similar concerns that the future training plans could reduce the standards of patient care and safety; that by de-skilling doctors, de facto ‘sub-consultants’ would be introduced who could be paid less, and be subject to more rigid terms and conditions of service; that unacceptable power would be given to local hospital managers to determine training and workforce planning; and limit the career aspirations of many hospital doctors to a sub-consultant grade.
So how does this fit with ‘The Predator State’ of the title?
It is the term used by economist James Galbraith (2008 book) to describe this phase of capitalism in which politicians have colluded with the corporate and financial sectors to privatize public services, using …
‘The state as monopoly collector of taxes and corrupt distributor of the spoils to the private sector.’
This is certainly what is happening to the NHS. Only this week, Richard Branson took over the NHS Children’s Services in Wiltshire. He will be paid by the state for that provision and will doubtless introduce the usual cost-cutting measures to increase its profitability ie reducing the wages bill, weakening union representation and paring the service back as much as possible. Using under or unskilled labour to do the work of a highly trained professional is the obvious way to reduce the wages bill – wages will be the biggest drain on his profits. The UK government will pay Branson for taking on the service (probably with a huge subsidy) and in return, we will get an impoverished service.
So what, where, why?
Aren’t we told that the Tories are all about ‘free-markets’ and competition … but that sounds just like a rigged ‘market’. How can Richard Branson possibly lose? Just as with the banks and care homes for the elderly, if the private company goes bust or gets fed up, the government will have to step in to pick up the pieces. In other words, it is yet again …
‘Privatisation of profits and socialization of losses.’
As Max Keiser pointed out, privatizing health, education and other public services provide great investment opportunities to hedge against more risky speculative ventures. And with another banking crisis predicted for the near future….
So why are the politicians going along with this rip-off of the nation?
Historically, we need to go back to Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, and even further back to Hayek on Mount Perelin in 1947. Put simply, Margaret Thatcher couldn’t bear the Welfare State and wanted Britain to resemble Churchill’s wartime fantasy of pre-WW2… The Austrian economist Hayek and his book ‘The Road to Serfdom’, offered her a political philosophy and economics that was an intellectual vehicle for her dreams. The fact that his ideas were so diametrically the opposite of the Welfare State and a mixed economy meant that there were limits to how fast radical dismantling/restructuring could occur without provoking riots. The ‘Boiling frogs’ strategy was adopted (put frogs in saucepan of cold water and gradually increase the heat – the frogs don’t notice until it’s too late).
The annual release of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet papers after the 30y rule confirms all this, and it is notable that this year, Cameron has stopped the release of a majority of the minutes from 1986.
But Margaret Thatcher was egged on and undoubtably manipulated by much bigger vested interests than her dreams of an England fit for Miss Marples and Agatha Christie. The City of London provided experts and consultants who saw the opportunity to return wealth and power to its ‘rightful heirs’ (and themselves) – those who we now call the 1% but more properly should be called the 0.1% or even the 0.001%.
It is highly significant that after the Great Depression, and in that short window of 1945-1979, the rich were not so rich and that has now been reversed back to ‘normal’.
http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf
Sadly, the LP lost its way in the 80s and bought into the idea that there was no alternative (TINA). Many actually believed in The Third Way. However as Tony Blair said recently, he had seen his role as to build on Margaret Thatcher’s achievements, and ironically, it seems that New Labour politicians continue to believe in ‘the wisdom of the markets’ when it is quite clear that George Osborne and the Republicans in the US do not.
James Galbraith insists that the original Monetarists like Milton Friedman were serious economists but after deregulation, market solutions were abandoned in favour of Crony Capitalism ‘in all important areas of policy-making’.
For them, [a market solution] now serves as nothing more than an enabling myth, used to hide the true nature of our world. Ironically, only the progressive still takes the call for “market solutions”
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/05/the-predator-st.html
In other words, we’re being spun a load of economic lies (like austerity, the deficit drama and competitive efficiency) which are intended to persuade us that the impoverishment of the next generation, to benefit the global over-class of super-rich, is unavoidable. And as it happens, we have a government of Old Etonians and aristocrats who belong to that over-class, as do their cronies, friends, relatives and future employers.
‘Cameron himself went to Eton, and the many Old Etonians in his inner circle include Oliver Letwin, minister for government policy; Jo Johnson, head of his policy unit; Ed Llewellyn, chief of staff; and Rupert Harrison, George Osborne’s chief economic adviser.’
“What did the new class… set out to do in political terms? The experience of the past decade permits a very simple summary explanation: they set out to take over the state and to run it — not for any ideological project but simply in the way that would bring to them, individually and as a group, the most money, the least disturbed power, and the greatest chance of rescue should something go wrong. That is, they set out to prey on the existing institutions of the [ ] regulatory and welfare system.”
So where does this leads us with regards to the junior doctors’ contract and Jeremy Hunt?
Jeremy Hunt’s behaviour really doesn’t make any sense if he wants a ‘seven day’ NHS. No-one can imagine that it is feasible, not without more doctors, more hospital porters, nurses, radiographers etc… and expecting 20bn worth of cuts to the NHS budget at the same time? The old adage is that if something doesn’t make sense, ‘Follow the Money’.
After the last 5y of Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill reorganization and cuts, it is no surprise that hospital doctors feel demoralized, undervalued, over worked and now they are being threatened with a substantial pay cut. Hunt’s imposition of the new contract on the Junior doctors is particularly criticized for driving doctors to work abroad.
Thousands are set to quit the NHS in protest over plans to shake up hours… more than 6,000 requests have been made for the paperwork needed to practise medicine outside the UK.
Well, the resulting shortage from a mass exodus of doctors would be a perfect reason for using under-skilled staff … and it could be even be spun as unreasonable doctors, disloyally abandoning the NHS. Hence, the conditions of the NHS could be harmonized with the expectations of private health care providers. And all who could afford it, would be tempted to go for private treatment… as in the two tier system of the US.
Hunt has good reason to want to upset and alienate the Junior doctors. It seems all too likely that he would love the awkward squad to go. Then he can move on to the consultants…
As James Galbraith writes:
There is no common good, no public purpose, no shareholder’s interest; we are the prey and governments as well as corporations are run by and for predators. The “failures” enrich the proper beneficiaries even as they “prove” government is no solution.
Fortunately, we’re not told the truth about how the economy really works… and there is no economic reason why a new courageous state could not (in time) restore the NHS to being an improved, truly nationalised service…. And it just so happens that Jeremy Corbyn supports full re-instatement of the NHS. Fingers crossed.
http://www.nhsbill2015.org/jeremy-corbyn-supports-the-nhs-reinstatement-bill/
Think Left 
Superb post, Sue.
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We need to take back our lives and jobs also our safety net for those who can’t help themselves.
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Once more, a superb analysis. Direct, approachable, and informative as ever. Thank you.
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Reblogged this on nearlydead.
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