The other night my wife and I watched an elegant British movie. costume, about a London tailor and seamstress who emigrates to America and ends up under the control of the neighboring mafia. One day, a local said to the mafia:
“We come here and build something for ourselves. And as soon as we get big enough, the bastards show up and take it away. Somebody’s playing with the toys. I’m like a spoiled child who would rather destroy his own toys than watch them.”
I got up and said to my wife: “This is like what happened to Britain when the Tories intervened. All those toys and British institutions were destroyed.”
Remember 2012? What a year! Britain was flat. Gordon Brown solved the banking crisis three years before he did, the Olympics became a global sensation and NHS healthcare workers danced their way into everyone’s hearts on its platform. They were all NHS volunteers and not American Super Bowl experts. Satisfaction with the NHS was at its highest since the 1950s and the NHS was the world’s most admired health organization.
all the toys were broken
What did conservatives do? They interfered with it to the death.They introduced his Health and Social Security Act of 2012 This foresaw that all NHS trusts would become or be merged into foundation trusts. The legislation also abolished existing caps on trust income from sources other than the NHS, opening the door to privatization. A devastating blow to the NHS’s ability to operate. This deadly privatization policy had dire consequences for the nation, paralyzing railway services, the Probation Service, the Royal Mail and the Water Board. Further ‘toy destruction’ takes place as their own supporters suffer as a result of poor performance.
Then, to further distress the country, Conservative Chancellor George Osborne introduced austerity. But it’s not for the rich. He used the lie that there was no money (there was always money – see HS2) to attack the poorest people by cutting funding to local authorities and public services in general. Conservative members applauded. Bertrand Russell once said:
“First of all, they charm fools. And they silence intellectuals.”
shut up the intellectuals
Intellectuals remain silent in the face of this cult-like behavior, wincing as they experience broken toys and ruined lives, but what clearly does not solve the problem, such as the Rwanda policy, I keep voting. Then there are the results. Consider the privatization of the NHS and railways. These institutions affect so many people in so many different fields that they are being “destroyed”.
The NHS treats around 360 million (yes, one million!) people a year. The company’s performance is influenced by social care, which mainly cares for more than 1.2 million elderly people. However, nursing care services are struggling. This is a result of privatization. More than 80% of nursing home beds are private, and not all can afford to pay a decent wage. Treasury’s deadly cocktail of outsourcing and cost reduction. This is impacting the NHS as there are currently 160,000 staff vacancies and it is almost impossible to provide proper care and lack of care leads to people becoming seriously ill and being admitted to hospital. . As the graph below shows, increased demand results in longer wait times, especially in urgent care. When the Conservatives were in power, waiting times of more than 12 hours between emergency treatment and admission to hospital were unheard of. That number now exceeds 400,000.
More money is spent on poorer quality services
Looking at rail, nearly 1 billion passenger rail trips were made in the year ending March 2022. The government has spent more on privatized railways in the last 30 years than it spent on British Rail in the 60 years before privatization, and the services are abysmal. The year before it was privatized, Intercity returned £100m of profits to the government. What will happen today? Private railway companies have been given £75 billion in subsidies over the past 10 years, and shareholders have been paid £409.7 million in dividends. Fares are now three times more expensive than comparable trips in Europe, and reliability has also worsened.
Therefore, if any of these institutions are tampered with by the government, a large portion of the population will be affected. The continued failure to fix the unfixable, rather than completely nationalizing the unfixable again, is most destructive.
Growing inequality, collapsing services
On the other hand, inequality will widen. As the graph below shows, the government has been ‘successful’ in this area. The number of people living in poverty in the world’s sixth largest economy rose by 148% between 2017 and 2022. What a victory for Osborne’s economic policy! What an embarrassment for the Government.
The graph says it all. But when have you heard a minister acknowledge the extent of the harm his policies have caused the British people? Or express remorse? Chris Grayling was notorious for making arrogant policy changes against all advice and then walking away from the messes he caused, including prisons, railways and probation.
The same applies to most ministers. The villains include Suella Braverman, Priti Patel and, of course, Boris Johnson. It seems to be the Conservative Party’s credo to neither acknowledge nor repent. Michael Gove may be an exception – he may now admit he made a mistake in canceling Labour’s £55bn school building plan just months after becoming education secretary in 2010. . However, the arrogance in the first place is breathtaking. The economic impact of construction remediation activities will be in the billions of dollars. Meanwhile, teacher morale is tragically low. But why did Mr Gove’s colleagues let him do it? Many said so to his face. This is the price of cult-like behavior.
Treasury-led cult
Who is the leader of this cabal? It is not the Prime Minister. He is, in gangster parlance, a Patsy. The leader is the Minister of Finance. Behind this series of misdeeds there is one common factor: cost cutting. This is the Treasury’s weapon of choice, and as it is, it is driven by flawed macroeconomic thinking. But it suits the command-and-control mentality of most politicians today.
All government departments are service organizations. Except for the Treasury Department, where, as the Secretary once told me, “the human race is doomed.” There is no service spirit. Its driving principle is control and its lever is financial allocation. This is the wrong method. The Treasury should exist to find and provide the funding that ministries and local governments seek. It is not Jeremy Hunt who decides how social care is funded or what HMRC needs to do its job. He has no expertise. It’s time for him to put the Prime Minister back in the box.
So how can we neutralize this coalition of dunces? That will only happen if the community stands up and refuses to support or submit to them, as some people did against the mafia. The time has come to do this with tens of thousands of people.
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