OK so the SPGB think the NHS and the welfare state were introduced in order to help capitalists make more profit. So when the NHS expands and gets more expensive, what do they say?
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/apr05/page12and13.html
I think my characterisation was fair. The SPGB have a hard time even conceiving of the possibility of winning genuine gains for the working class outside of the workplace.
But hang on there - not so quick to jump to conclusions!
Firstly , I dont think the SPGB has ever said that it is not possible for the workers to make gains. What they have said is that such gains are only likely to happen insofar as they do not conflict with the needs of the profit system as was definitely the case with the post war welfare state reforms which even prominent capitalists themselves judged to be in the interests of the system itself as the pamphlet amply demonstrates.
Secondly, you mention NHS which according to the SPGB aided profitability and increased efficiency. But you ask what happens when the NHS expands and gets more expensive. Well the answer as you might expect is that it cannot do so indefinitely since it will then become an increasingly unaccepable burden on the productive (or surplus-value producing) sector of the economy undermining its international competitiveness. There is a limit to gains that workers can make and this limit is, moreover, variable and circumstance-dependent. Come an economic recession, much if not all of the previous gains could well be wiped out. I read a few months ago that a series of internal NHS documents recently revealed that tens of thousands of NHS workers could soon be sacked, hospital units closed and patients denied treatments under secret plans for £20 billion of health cuts in a bid to reduce Britains record £167 billion deficit ("Hospital wards to shut in secret NHS cuts" Daily Telegraph Jon Swaine and Holly Watt, 26 Mar 2010.).
This is exactly what the SPGB model of the ecomony you refer to would have predicted. According to this model, capitalism is inherently unstable veering between boom and depression. The constraints built into this model means that any gains that workers make are likely to be transitory and that in the long run it is fundamental economoc trends such as the growth in productivity that are really decisive in the rise in living standards rather than the political shenanigans of reformist politicans promising us the earth if we only put an X behind their name.
The problem is that the unproductive sector (including the NHS) has been growiing at a rate above that of the prioductitve sector) for some time now and this is one of the reasons why we have reached crunch time and can expect a period of savage cutbacks to resore levels of priofitability with all that this entails for the gains that workers had previously made in their living standards