SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
AS we mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the NHS this week, at such a distance in time from its founding it’s easy to skim over the scale of the challenges that the Labour government had to overcome to achieve it — and if we were to believe the majority of political and media narrators, the challenges it now faces require more or less all of its founding principles to be undone to “save” it.
We have been told for more than a decade now by successive Conservative governments that the investment required to maintain the NHS would be “unsustainable” — without the endless series of Tory “reforms,” of course.
At the same time, we’re also told ad nauseam that the Tories are, in fact, putting “record” sums into the NHS — the politicians and talking heads always leave out that a penny over the last budget would be a “record” and yet the NHS budget has faced almost unbroken real-terms cuts disguised as “records.”
In the second part of her critique of Wes Streeting’s TenYear Plan for Health, HELEN MERCER looks at the central planks of this privatisation blueprint
We need a massive change in direction to renew a crumbling health service — that’s why Plaid Cymru has an ambitious plan to recentre primary care by recruiting 500 additional GPs and opening six new elective care hubs across Wales, writes MABON AP GWYNFOR
When privatisation is already so deeply embedded in the NHS, we can’t just blindly argue for ‘more funding’ to solve its problems, explain ESTHER GILES, NICO CSERGO, BRIAN GIBBONS and RATHI GUHADASAN



