Servic NHS: always popular, but never democratically controlled nity services should not be run as a market or split into counterposed "purchasers" and "providers."
Staff employed by local health authorities should be empioved by the same organisation as staff employed to work in hospitals. Trust hospitals and services should be reintegrated into a de-: mocratised NHS and District Health Authority structure.
2. Local health services should be governed by direct election of health services councillors onto boards that would also include: representatives from nursing and other trade unions, medical staff and patients.
3. Labour should recognise and actively organise against the Tory's three pronged attack on the NHS: cuts in funding, the internal market and the end of national pay bargaining.
Of course Blair is backtracking on the Tory NHS 'reforms'. If Blair has his way, then the market system and NHS Trusts are here to stay.
But others in the labour movement do have a real desire to strengthen democracy in the NHS.
And calls for democracy in the NHS will strengthen arguments for the possibility of greater public control over other re-nationalised industries.
Success in the struggle to increase democratic control in the NHS would strengthen our ability to argue in Powergen. The fight for democratic control may start with nationalisation, but does not end there.