Chris Burford wrote.
>No. A major internal success of the government has been to roll back the
>Conservative government's fiction that the NHS can be run with an "internal
>market". It has also largely socialised the independent providers of health
>care, the general practitioners, in "primary care trusts" Although they are
>threatening to resign en masse if they do not get better terms and
>conditions, they are shifting from being petty bourgeois independent
>professionals to being privileged workers in a complex socialised economic
>system.
-Do you have data on NHS budget in the "New Labour´s years"?
>By winning support across the range of working people with low taxes the
>Labour Party is now in a position to benefit from the change in the mood of
>the electorate that is recognising the need for expenditure comparable with
>European continental standards, on the social infrastructure.
-But is the New Labour willing to do this?
>The old cry of the entrists.
-What is entrism?
>I have got to skim otherwise you won't get any response from me at all.
>The author is incorrect that there is no alternative to working in the
>Labour Party. In some respects the Liberal Democrats have policies more
>progressive than Labour at present. Furthermore there is a much increased
>role for pressure group politics in a pluralist civil society. Half the
>agenda of Charter 88 has been achieved with major constitutional changes in
>the position of Wales and Scotland and of the House of Lords. The
>Conservatives will lose their control of the Lords in the months after the
>General Election. There is a lot of tactical voting going on. There is a
>big need to push through the agenda of constitutional change to get
>proportional representation in local and national elections so as to allow
>parties to the left of Labour to get some representation without letting in
>the Conservatives.
-So are you for the building of a party at the left of Labour? Are there any efforts to do it? An report from WSW mentioned the Socialist alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party.It seems the current system is very bad for left parties. A friend of mine, which defined itself as communist, said that he would vote for Liberal democrats since they are at the left of Labour and he lives in a conservative district.
Alexandre