I was not surprised the Tories lost the north London suburbsEnfield, most of Barnet and all of Harrow. I worked in the Barnet hospitals from 1990 to 1994, and I watched Tory voters change the habits of a lifetime.
One day I read in the paper that there was a waiting list for intensive care baby units. I went round to a friend in the maternity unit and asked her if that meant what I thought it did. She said yesthey put premature babies on a waiting list for an incubator and of course some of them died on the list. In her job she counselled one or two couples every week whose baby had died on the list. Sometimes she told them the cuts had killed their baby. That made her feel bettershe was very angry. But she thought in the long run it was worse for them: their rage would make it impossible for them ever to grieve properly. So other times she didn't tell the parents.
My friend was not happy with the reforms in the NHS.
I hitched a ride with a tutor in the school of nursing, in tears as she drove. Her husband was a junior manager who had just lost his job. He was at home and she could see him shrivel as a person. Suddenly it looked like she might lose her job too, and then they would lose the house.
Another friend, a health visitor, worked four days a week. Her husband had always brought in the money. Now he was redundant from his job as a junior manager with the gas board. 'He was always the strong one', she said, 'and now he's embarrassed in front of our friends and the children. I hate them,' she said. Them was the managers.
Another nurse told me how she lay awake to three in the morning, night after night, imagining ways of murdering her new manager. She was getting very tired. And she was a kindly, respectable person. She had never been angry that way beforeshe was frightened and ashamed.
She was not the only one. I worked in an HIV unit. We did training courses for about 15 nurses at a time. On the morning break, at lunch, at tea, they would compare stories of the cuts in their different units and the awful new managers. They did it immediately, without small talk, because they had done it before and they were hungry for an opportunity to generalise, to understand that what was happening to everyone was happening to them.
I went to a meeting of health visitor managers to talk about Aids. They were older women, lifelong nurses, proud of their professionalism, conservative with a small c. All of them looked at me with hatred before the meeting. When I was introduced as the man from the Aids unit everybody smiled at me and said they were sorry, they thought I was another man from the business plan. The last one had told them he previously worked for Truman's, the brewery, and what they had to understand was that patients were just like bottles.
The new management from the trust had a way of dealing with old managers like them. They made them all apply for one new job, and then they appointed the least competent. That scared everybody working under them. And it gave them a poodle to carry out their orders.
On the last tube train one night I got chatting with an oddly dressed man who clearly had considerable experience as a customer of north London's mental health services. We agreed that the old big mental hospitals they were closing were horrible places, but they were at least some sort of asylum for the people who now had to go mad in lonely rooms or sleeping on the streets. 'They keep going on about Victorian values,' he said. 'Who do they think built the mental hospitals?'
The Victorians, of course. What was under attack in the new NHS was a set of values and beliefs that had served many 'professionals' well for a long time. A lot of the people I worked with were middle aged and proud of their profession. They joined the Royal College of Nursing, not Unison. They owned a car and a small house in a Tory suburb. Many voted Tory. Now the Tories were pissing on everything that gave meaning to their lives.
And taking their livelihoods away. Qualified nurses had traditionally worked towards eventually becoming a 'G grade', a sister in charge of a ward or a clinic. But the management had discovered that, when staffing levels fell too far below the nationally regulated minimum on the ward, the sister in charge would call in agency staff to help out and thus bust the budget. So they began to get rid of G grades and replace them with one manager in charge of three wards. Unlike the old sisters, these new super-managers would not work alongside the other nurses on the ward. Instead they'd just sit in their office answering the phone and telling you no, you couldn't get agency staff in to cover.
And because the G grades were losing their jobs all over London, the redundant sisters had to go back to work as agency staff at £2,000 or £5,000 less a year.
Like everybody else in the country, we started calling our new managers 'the suits'.
They came to work in £300 suits, not the cheap kind other people buy for weddings and funerals. They owned more than one suit. The point was how much they cost. They told us all that management was an interchangeable skill. Many of them had been nurses. But running a hospital did not mean you had to know medicine. You just had to know people and balance sheets, particularly balance sheets.
Consultant doctors who had always worn suits to work began to turn up in trousers and a shirt so other people wouldn't think they were suits. The Parliamentary Labour Party all began to wear £300 suits.
The government announced it was closing Barnet Hospital. A campaign was organised by the nurses in casualty and their relatives. The two most active people in the campaign were lifelong Tory activists. They came to meetings organised by the hospital unions. We saved the hospital.
The government announced the closure of Edgware Hospital instead. The local Edgware and Harrow Tory MPs called a public meeting in protest. They mobilised for it by contacting every Tory on their contact lists. Around 500 people came. They packed the stairs outside the meeting room. They packed the balconies outside the windows. They howled at the MPs. Over and over people shouted from the floor that they would never vote Tory again. Brian Butterworth of the Socialist Workers Party spoke from the floor. A Tory held a Socialist Worker paper over Brian's head as he spoke so everybody would know who he was. A third of the room still stamped their feet and cheered Brian madly.
This was a Tory meeting.
The regional health authority announced the closure of the school of nursing. The Royal College of Nursing held a meeting for the nurse tutors. Nurse tutors are, if anything, more staid and conservative than nursing sisters. But they got angrier as their RCN full timer spent 40 minutes explaining to them how to claim redundancy. When somebody from the floor said what we need in this country is a revolution, I walked to the front and told them they had to fight. I couldn't promise they'd win, but in ten years time they'd be glad they still had their dignity.
They were professionals, so of course they felt they could not strike. But they were teachers, so they felt they could cancel all their classes, rent three coaches and take all their students down to demonstrate outside the regional health authority.
We didn't save the school of nursing, but we did save most of their jobs in the new amalgamated school of nursing.
One weekend the community health trust 'discovered' a hole in their budget and laid off all the casual agency staff in the geriatric hospital. That left gaping holes in staffing. To cover them the trust brought in health visitors, school nurses, gardeners and electricians to do the nursing. At first they went, in fear of their jobs.
We called a meeting of all community nurses, union and non-union, in Thatcher's Finchley constituency. I proposed that we demonstrate outside the local Tory headquarters. One nurse said she was prepared to demonstrate and she was prepared to strikethings she had never been willing to do beforebut she wasn't ready yet to stop being a Tory. One of our union activists said to me, 'Jonathan, there are a lot of other people here who feel the same way.' So I let it go, and we demonstrated in Finchley High Road instead. That gave everybody the confidence to refuse to cover in the hospital.
The Tories at the Tory meeting, the nurse tutors and the Tory community nurses were all in the process of changing their understanding of the world. That's not a simple or an easy thing. The suits were teaching them their place in the world. They had thought there was one society. Now they had to understand there were two sides and they were on the bottom side. This wrenched apart their whole view of themselves. So their consciousness changed, and is changing, in fragmented and contradictory ways.
The community nurse who didn't want to stop being a Tory also insisted that we must not have the manual workers in the trust at our demonstration. She could march, but not them. I told her I was bringing the manual workers, I was marching with them, and she should too. I did and she did. And I'll bet she didn't vote Tory last month.
Labour promised to save Edgware Hospital. The government has now told the new local MPs it will be a 'cottage hospital'effectively closed. We must not assume that's that. Protest stopped the Tories closing neighbouring Barnet Hospital. Protest can certainly stop a Labour government. And the hospital workers who have changed are still changing.