The bigwigs lording over the NHS in the North of Ireland have put it upon themselves to increase their salaries by 50 percent in the past three years. The result? The top brass in Stormont’s Department of Health now commands more than a staggering £2 million in annual salaries!
At the best of times, this would look pretty bad, to say the least. But we are not living in the best of times. In fact, the whole of the NHS is in an ever-deepening crisis, with our healthcare system in the North at the very bottom of the pile. Waiting times this year are already the worst ever recorded, and the situation has been described by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine as being “utterly horrifying”.
For the past few years, all we have heard from Stormont is that there is not enough money for healthcare, social services, or anything really. And yet the MLAs can find plenty of money when it comes to increasing their salaries by £14,000, while the esteemed health executives get even more.
Well then, if there is so much money for those bureaucrats that have run down the NHS to an acute crisis, surely there must be plenty for the staff who are at the coalface? Not quite, it turns out.
This year alone, resident doctors have gone out on strike because their pay has decreased in real terms by 20 percent since 2008. But as Stormont’s then Health Minister Mike Nesbitt explained when talking about the strikes, “there is simply no scope” for a pay increase that can keep up with inflation for doctors, only a meager 3.5 percent, which in reality amounts to a massive pay cut. And the situation is no better for nurses, paramedics and the whole staff.
The reality is that, far from the executives running the NHS for the benefit of workers and youth, their real job is to organise the NHS ‘within available resources’ – that is to savagely cut down anything they can, keep staff wages as low as possible, increase the workload of staff to the limit etc. In fact, given the deep crisis of the British exchequer, Westminster has made it very clear that the North is down for some significant austerity.
From this perspective, the health executives have actually been very busy indeed, and certainly due for a good raise or two given the ‘smashing’ job they’ve been doing so far.
Rather than paying executives millions of pounds, would it not be better to use that money to improve the pay and working conditions of doctors, nurses and all the staff who make the NHS function every day? And better yet, rather than having these parasites making decisions from on high – for the benefit of capitalism – would an NHS controlled and run by the workers who know it best not create a more efficient and effective health service for workers and youth?
Yes, it absolutely would.
But no matter how rational this sounds, as long as capitalism remains the NHS will continue to be run down and its resources syphoned off by the ruling class. It is for this reason that we need to fight for socialism.
