Anti-unionist rage cannot make unionism confront responsibility for the protocol but at least in Britain there’s a surge of useful anger.
The latest stage of the ‘cost of living crisis’ might yet give Keir Starmer more nerve. Don’t mock. Cynicism dulls anger into something like resignation. As about unionism, though maybe this is just end of year blues.
Yes, Conservatives everywhere have been slow to see how their greed and entitlement rubs already suffering people raw. Boris Johnson tells parliamentary records about his £1 million for four speeches since leaving Downing Street – to investment bankers, insurance brokers, the Times of India and Portugal’s Televisao Independente. Plus more than £40,000 worth of accommodation since he resigned from Tory donor Lord Bamford and his wife. (Bamford of JCB bulldozers, remember? Photo ops in boiler suits.) There is no way to spin those earnings into a less than disgusting comment on the commercial world. Even more telling is that Johnson feels no need for spin. Though he is apparently still thinking of a comeback.
Sky last week reported tens of thousands of nurses ‘across England, Wales and Northern Ireland in their first mass walkout in over a century’. Wide support for the exasperated strikers makes it easier for Starmer to back the strikers, harder for the right-wing papers to rant against trade unions. Driving nurses to strike should surely be among the most shaming charge against politicians. Tories have not sounded ashamed. This Conservative government has neither morality nor common sense.
Such is the cynicism of the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Express that they have begun floating the fantasy that incompetent health services ‘waste’ a Conservative government’s tax increases. This is their only response to the saga of George Osborne’s ‘austerity’ programme, implemented with a will by health ministers Andrew Lansley and then Jeremy Hunt, which starved the NHS of resources including medics, leaving it ill-prepared to face Covid. As were hospitals and GPs in Northern Ireland.
Of David Cameron, Osborne and Hunt only Hunt is still in politics, re-purposed as the ‘grown-up’ to clean up after Liz Truss. But in 2016 a cross-party committee of MPs found that Hunt had ‘broken his pledges on NHS funding’ and misled ‘the public about health service reforms’. As the tiny but hardworking ‘i’ newspaper reported in October, the government had claimed that by 2020-21 it would be injecting £8.4bn on top of inflation into the NHS, though the real figure was more likely to be £4.5bn. Hunt admitted to the MPs that when he promised £10bn a year above inflation for the NHS in the five years to 2020 he had included the previous year in the calculation, boosting the figure by £1.5bn.
Hunt has re-invented himself pretty successfully, in part because the next generation of frontline Tories has been incompetent as well as shameless. It’s hard to believe that any of them have seen today’s hospitals up close, other than in those visits in workwear the Johnson/Truss era liked so much.
Before the strike last week BBC NI’s health specialist Marie-Louise Connolly found local director of the Royal College of Nursing Rita Devlin ‘feeling like weeping’ after visiting an overwhelmed RVH emergency department. (Emergency, as uniquely pressured, is exempt from strike action.) A nurse for 40 years, Devlin saw people ‘lying head-to-toe everywhere, close enough to touch each other.’
Billions were written off for unusable PPE but the government says what nurses are asking for is ‘not affordable’. Head of the Royal College of Nursing Pat Cullen said last week that what nurses were asking for was ‘the 20 per cent that has been taken out of their pay over the last decade’.
Whatever becomes of this strikes season today’s Tories are having to talk faster and surely, in time, must fret more. Having a staggeringly wealthy money-man as leader while nurses go to food banks could only have seemed a good idea to a party already damned.
