Between 2011 and 2018 the EU Commission made 63 demands that governments cut spending on healthcare and/or outsource or privatise health services.

As we struggle with the new problems created by the Covid-19 pandemic and the problems caused by capitalism’s underfunding of public health infrastructure and the commercialisation and privatisation of health and social care in the pursuit of profit which fulfils the privatisation agenda of the European Union we recall the telling words of Des O’Hagan written in a different time.

“The fightback has begun, to some extent, in different countries and at different levels.

But as capitalism develops its common European mansion with strategic headquarters in Brussels and Strasbourg, the urgency of our concern to begin building a common European home within which the citizen will be lord and master is clear.  

It demands a new unity of thought, of purpose and of action. It can draw on the strengths (and mistakes) of the past; it demands also that we create a leadership with a bright and inspiring vision of a world unified in the pursuit of human freedom.”

The words of Des O’Hagan who died on 5^th May 2015