We are indeed living in strange times. The National Health Service is on its knees, or as in the words of Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer, “it’s not just on its knees, it’s on its face”. People are dying on hospital corridors, or in their homes waiting for ambulances that don’t arrive on time, or sometimes not at all, while all the main stories in the press, on the BBC and news channels is what Harry said about Wills. What is going on? Don’t ordinary people matter anymore? When did we lose perspective? Has human life somehow been sneakily devalued?
The undermining of the NHS, and by extension the value of human life itself, seems to have happened directly as a result of the failure of successive British governments to understand what is important.
When the Tories were elected twelve years ago, they had a clear vision of how things should be run. No one doubts that they had a plan, a clear and simple ideology, that they “knew” would provide the answer to the problems of the British economy. Simple minded ideologies are wonderful things, and they have special appeal to the simple minded. In the clear-cut Tory doctrine, if they focussed on creating economic growth, they would be better able to fund public services, and they claimed, paradoxically, that by cutting back spending on public services with swinging austerity measures, that the economy would be freed from the cost burdens creating a boom time, and that these “jam tomorrow” policies would eventually produce benefits for all. A less kind interpretation of their aims, given that all during the austerity period they cut taxes for the better off, was that they and their supporters had an antipathy about paying their fair share of tax, and just wanted a better income for themselves. Why put their hard-earned income into the pockets of ordinary folk, and especially the subset of the “poor” who they deemed workshy benefit scroungers?
Now, I am not an economist, and the following comments must be seen in that light, but as I understand it, economies are driven by supply and demand. And what the Tories wanted to do was to support the supply side of the economy: the small businesses, the producers, entrepreneurs and multinationals (their people), who, in their mind, produced the wealth. Unfortunately, the deficits of poor ideologies, whether clear-minded or not, are soon revealed. As soon as simplicity collides with the complexity of reality things start to go wrong. As I see it, there are two problems with the Tory approach, one is that if the better off do well they tend to filter much of their money into offshore tax havens so that tax revenues are reduced, and this money is effectively lost to the economy, reducing the effectiveness of their policy. The second is that for a supply/demand economy to work effectively there has to be a balance between the two parts, and by imposing pay restraint on vast sectors of the working population, this necessarily reduces demand. The supply side cannot make big profits, grow the economy, and pay their taxes if no one can afford to buy their products, which is where the impoverishing of the majority in an austerity driven economy inevitably leads.
Most people in Britain were clever enough to be suspicious about the Tory’s wonderfully clear vision for the future, despite the Tory “friends in high places” right-wing press propaganda. And in election after election the majority of voters voted against them, unfortunately the corrupt first-past-the-post electoral system meant that they won time after time, and in one case with a massive majority.
However, no one can deny that the British public voted for the Tory policy of Brexit however narrowly the result was, even if the suggested benefits of it were grossly exaggerated, and even lied about, and the hard-line extreme Brexit that was eventually implemented seriously damaged the economy, and meant that one part of Britain, Northern Ireland, was left without any government at all.
While the Labour Party have much to be proud of for creating the NHS in the first place, the half-way-house policies of Tony Blair introduced an internal market in the NHS, and we now see the results of that policy as contractors are now creaming off NHS funding for their own private profit, at the expense of the taxpayer, and robbing funding from the cash starved hospital trusts who desperately need the money.
If, as expected, the Labour Party win the next election, they will be faced with a massive task to rebuild the country and repair its devastated economy. Radical action will be necessary. A new EU referendum would obviously be a necessary step, and a recent poll found that two thirds of the British public would favour a second referendum. And, in the massive NHS crisis, where innocent people are dying all over the country, what is the cornerstone of Sir Keir’s message? While he is right to want to increase taxes for non-doms and those who can oppose it, his key policy seems to be… Wait for it… More devolution. Let’s move decision making from Westminster out to the regions. What! Who cares? People want their loved ones to have ambulances available for them. They want to know that if they become ill, they will have the treatment they have a right to expect, they want to know that their wages will be enough to cover their monthly costs. At a time like this, who among the general population is interested in devolution? As for a second EU referendum this also seems to have been ruled out.
Will we get a Labour government the country needs? The signs do not look good.
Peter D Fisher 