THE NHS turned 73 this weekend and in celebration, staff and supporters took to the streets in 70 locations across the country to protest over privatisation, patient safety and pay justice. 

The protest in Colchester kicked off from the ruins of an ancient priory built in c1100 — a location that would have provided free medical care and alms to the poor during the medieval era until King Henry VIII appropriated the property of all monasteries, priories, friaries and convents in England to fund his military campaigns in the 1540s or give as gifts to his closest cronies. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Just like the dissolution of the monasteries was a power- and money-grab back then, the slow death by a thousand cuts to our NHS is just as, if not even more, detrimental to the working class of Britain. 

“It’s bad isn’t it, they do it by stealth, slowly, so people don’t realise but it is happening, we are losing our NHS,” one passerby stated as she spoke to organisers before the march. 

A Tory voter stopped and wished the organisers well, saying: “I still support some of the Tory policies but I don’t support the destruction of our NHS, God bless you for fighting for it.”

While not everyone is prepared to march in support of the NHS, the message is starting to sink in and people realise it isn’t just a campaign issue to win votes in Parliament, the loss of our NHS is a real and immediate threat to society. 

Some 250 people marched through Colchester, chanting: “Boris Johnson pull out your wallet, pay us properly, we know you’ve got it!” and “When I say cutbacks, you say fight back, cutback, fight back!” 

Many unions supported the march — GMB, CWU, NEU, Unite and Royal College of Nurses all turned out to stand with NHS staff. 

The march ended in Castle Park with a small rally with several speeches from nurses, patients and an activist from Kill the Bill. 

Nurse and GMB rep Holly Turner kicked off the rally: “As a nurse, I’ve been dealt a decade of real-terms cuts to my pay and my workload only continues to increase. 

“Many workers have been victims of avoidable death and illness, whilst dodgy contracts and profit have been placed above staff and patient safety. 

“We’re saying no more, this cannot go on, we are in a crisis.”

Adolescent mental health teacher Jim English shared how when he was a newly qualified nurse his salary allowed him to purchase a home, which was valued at four times his salary. 

He went on to say: “Now the average house price — and this isn’t including what is happening in the south-east — is 10 times the salary of a newly qualified nurse and we know what’s happening with extortionate rent.

“The attack on nurses’ pay affects many aspects of our lives … Since 2010 nurses’ pay has decreased overall by 3.2 per cent.”

Fifteen volunteers from the Essex Bangladeshi Women’s Association worked with the NHS vaccination programme — Salma Ahmed was one of them and she spoke about the inequalities exposed during the pandemic.

“Covid-19 has exposed the inequalities within our society and has had a disproportionate impact on our black, Asian and minority communities.” 

Ahmed applauded the NHS staff for helping to reassure and work with the community to make them more comfortable taking the vaccine. 

Vannessa Davis, Essex Branch secretary of Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said: “At the start of this pandemic we had 43,000 nursing vacancies across this country and that is a result of years and years of workforce planning that has actually stopped investing in staff. 

“So in 2019 RCN asked members to give them some examples of what we were doing to hold the NHS together and our members said they were going without food, without drinks, without having a wee for an entire shift and they were working sometimes up to 10 hours extra time over and above their shifts to maintain patient safety in this country. That is not sustainable.” 

Georgia Townsend from the NEU attended the march in solidarity with the NHS staff but spoke about the death of her grandad during the first wave of the pandemic. 

She praised the dedication and compassion shown by the nurses, at a time when families were not allowed to visit and when they were being let down by the lack of PPE and staff shortages. 

Anthony Sullivan from Kill the Bill spoke passionately about the final reading of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill on July 5 and how we need to fight back against it. 

“Why? Because it places dangerous new limits on the right to protest such as this excellent protest today … Why are they doing it? 

“There’s a simple answer here — protest works and they know it. So it was mass demonstrations like Peterloo or the suffragettes 100 years ago, which won us, the working class, the right to vote, it was the Black Lives Matter protests that ensured that the murderer of George Floyd was made accountable.” 

This government continues to pull pages out of the Henry VIII playbook. Anyone who spoke against the dissolution of the monasteries was executed or jailed — and this government is pushing through a policy that will fine or arrest anyone that uses protest to fight back against their monstrous cutbacks to public services. 

After the loss of the religious buildings in England between 1536 and 1541, the working-class people were badly affected and more vagrants were visible everywhere. 

It worried the lords that there would be a revolt so they looked for solutions. Do you know what that led to? Workhouses. 

Is this the destination the Tories want for the working class of Britain? Is this the future we want to see in this country? 

If it isn’t we must all start standing up in solidarity with our NHS, with Kill the Bill, with all our workers facing fire and rehire or attacks to their livelihoods. 

They have taken enough from the workers of this country, it is imperative that they do not take any more from us.