14 minute read
Politics
Welcome to 2023: Change is coming
THE need for change is tangible. It is bubbling up in every region, every county, every town and every community. I hear it every day here in north Dorset. There is a deep-seated tiredness, a distaste for the same old, same old bleat and spin:
“Brexit is great.” No, it isn’t. It isn’t anything like what was promised. “We have taken back control.” No, you haven’t. “The trade deals are great.” No, they are not. They are selling farmers in the Vale down the river. There is no clear future model for improving our selfsufficiency in food.
“Social Care has been fixed.” No it hasn’t, not by miles, not by years, not by billions. “The NHS is in safe hands.” No it isn’t. US money lurks in the wings. Just as with eyes and teeth, other parts will be carved away and run with the skew that profit motives give to decision-
Mike Chapman on behalf of Liberal Democrats across the Blackmore Vale
making.
“The problems in the railways, Royal Mail, the ambulances, the Border Force, the driving test examiners are nothing to do with us, guv.” Yes, they are, Gov. They reflect a them-and-us attitude and managerial culture flowing from the top which perpetuates out of date, confrontational practices on all sides, left and right. In the case of the railways, the word ‘sustainable’ applied to the current model is risible. When air travel between our major cities is less costly than rail, our Victorian legacy can be seen to be evaporating before our very eyes. Such a good plan to split it all up into umpty-um little fiefdoms, eh? What nonsense.
“We are on top of illegal immigration.” No, no one is nor will be until our world recognises the flow of migrants is caused by the horrors of war, famine and economic hardship. All the migrants are doing is getting on their bikes. Tories used to applaud that. The idea that you can stop migration through deterrence is ridiculous. The solutions lie in investment in more fairness, less economic exploitation, less idiot nationalism and less religious fervour.
“We are as green as can be.” Not by a long chalk. You don’t walk the walk and now you don’t even talk the talk. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t quite cut it for the Maldives and many Pacific Ocean island states. I wonder if we will be as complacent when it comes to swathes of East Anglia and much of London’s finest real estate. The pictures of the raised Thames Barrier this month were impactful and insightful.
The Tories have this air of always being in charge, of being the ruling class. Change is coming, though. It is coming from the thought-leaders, people with the smarts and hard heads to provide solutions, shape opportunities and the big hearts to deliver fairness. Stand by.
Britain and the great wealth divide
WITH a new year upon us, and at a time when so many are finding their finances stretched to breaking point, two recent news items caught my eye.
The first was by the Equality Trust, stating that the number of UK billionaires has significantly increased since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020 there were 147, but there are now 177.
The report also says that government and central bank interventions, aimed at supporting businesses and households, actually helped to fuel a boom in property and stock market prices and thereby lined the pockets of wealthy investors.
Our warped economic structure enables the richest few to accrue a huge amount of our nation’s wealth, while foodbank use soars, 3.9 million children live in poverty and 6.7 million households struggle to heat their homes.
Such entrenched levels of inequality bring higher levels of violent crime and mental illness, and lower levels of health and trust in our economy and democracy.
The second item of news that got my attention was a speech given by the chairman of the UK’s Charity Commission, in which he stated that while the voluntary sector faces an existential crisis, the UK’s top one per cent of earners give even less to charity now than they did ten years ago.
Although their income grew by ten per cent in real terms between 2011 and 2019, their average donation to charity fell by 20 per cent to just £48 a month. A truly shameful figure.
Worse still, although as a whole top earners gave an annual total of about £3 billion to charitable causes, it is estimated this was down to the generosity of just one in five of them. For comparison, less well-off people in the UK gave about £10.7 billion to charitable causes last year, and very many also gave their time to act as volunteers and trustees.
What is it about humans that – with some exceptions, of course – those who have much more than they need tend to want even more, while those with the least are among the most generous in sharing what little they have? Why has our economic system evolved to funnel so much wealth upwards to the few, while failing to cater fully for the basic needs of the many?
Regulation and taxation are political choices. Rather than looking to save money through yet more cuts to public services, we need tax reforms to target the very wealthy and close the tax avoidance loopholes.
The money thus raised would greatly improve the lives of so many, and make our society more equal and democratic. We need a government that does what we pay it to do and run the country for the benefit of us all, do we not?
Ken Huggins on behalf of the Green Party in North Dorset
Pay offer to nurses is ‘ridiculous’
AFTER another tumultuous year in the political life of the UK, it is good to know that the dreadful handling of the NHS has been recognised by the King’s Fund in a recent report on the Conservative’s record as being due to “a decade of neglect...leaving it with too few staff, too little equipment and too many outdated buildings to perform the amount of surgery needed.”
Embarrassing or what?
The report goes on to compare that unfavourably with the tactics used by the Blair-Brown Labour Government in the late 1990s in chasing down the horrendously long waits for both care and operations, which that Government found on taking office in 1997.
While Rishi Sunak is throwing everything at the waiting times problem, it is
Alan Cross, on behalf of Dorset Labour
only having a limited effect.
Those ten years of Tory/ LibDem ‘austerity’ have come back to bite him!
Sunak would be entitled to quietly curse David Cameron and Theresa May.
With the NHS cracking up under the strain of the Covid epidemic, it has to be said that those years of neglect, together with loss of staff through ‘burn-out’, return of workers to Europe following Brexit, and the huge deficiency of nursing and doctoral staff due to this Tory Government’s inability to recruit and train enough people, has led to this current impasse with the administration.
And is it small wonder the bubble has burst over the ridiculous pay offer made by the so-called ‘independent’ pay review body.
This is a fight this Tory government is totally unable to win.
It should call for pay talks with the unions now as this dispute shows signs of becoming nasty.
And let’s not forget the nurses are the ‘darlings and heroes’ of the Covid days of two years ago, and polls still show overwhelming support for this strike.
Rishi Sunak says we cannot keep inflation down with such pay deals being done.
I say without upping the pay offer already on the table there will be no NHS left.
This is a pretty weak argument from this Government stuffed full of billionaires and millionaires, and given the billions of pounds lost in rotten PPE deals for Covid and the £40billion lost during the disastrous and short-lived leadership of Liz Truss and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.
This year we will be getting closer than ever to the next Labour Government, this time under Keir Starmer’s control. A happy New Year to all readers.
‘My hope is for stability and civility’
MAY I begin by wishing you a very happy and peaceful New Year. I hope you were able to enjoy Christmas despite both the weather and the multitude of bugs and viruses that seemed to strike every family with Biblical severity.
Readers of keen memory may recall that I thought it was the word ‘change’ that best summarised 2022. My hopes for 2023 are twofold – stability and civility.
Turning to the latter first. I do not use this regular column to be overly party political. I represent all residents of North Dorset so I try to be as nonpartisan as I can be. From my inbox readers seem to appreciate this approach. I write my columns as the Member of Parliament rather than the Conservative MP.
I am, of course, proud to be a Conservative, a Party I have been a member of since 1985. So my incessant non-Party drum beating is not out of any sense of timidity – I merely think it the better thing to do.
Elections, local and general, are approaching but not until May 2024 – to hear some, one could be forgiven for thinking an election is around the corner. But, the political temperature is beginning to rise and the pace quicken. There will be a vigorous battle of ideas – waged with passion and energy. There will be political disagreements but, as I have got older, I realise that one can disagree without being disagreeable. Better to play the ball not the man. Cheap and snide shots are best left in the drawer.
So my first hope is we can have civility and respect in our political discussion. Given the upheavals we all witnessed over the last few years, I firmly believe it is what most people in the country, and certainly in North Dorset, want.
My second hope for 2023 is for stability. I think we all recognise we are living in a new world order. The impacts of Covid, the invasion of Ukraine – coupled to its domestic economic impacts – and the recalibrating of the UK’s economic model post EU membership made this inevitable. Change has come upon us thick and fast leaving most people feeling exhausted. 2023 needs to be a year of stability. Letting the dust settle. Surveying the scene and replotting the course. The country at large wants and deserves UK political stability. It wants to see the Government deal with serious issues in a serious way.
I have every confidence that the Prime Minister will have this as his guiding star throughout the year. The markets have responded favourably to the Government’s economic policy. Who knows, there may be some currently unforeseen headroom when it comes to the next budget. We must hope that inflation has peaked and will be beginning to fall to something like 5-6 per cent by June. That of itself will provide stability for policy making.
So, a civil and stable 2023. Not too much to ask for is it?
Conservative MP for North Dorset Simon Hoare
Politics
Wages, inflation and productivity...
HAPPY New Year everyone. I’m hoping for a better one than ’22 and certainly no repetition of our ’21 annus horribilis!
The auguries are quite positive with gas prices coming down and with them things like construction costs. However, we must tame inflation and improve productivity in key industries. That means wage restraint and more intelligent modern ways of working of the sort now routinely seen in successful European countries.
A big part of the block is the resurgence of 1970s-style militant trade unions. Rail is a good case in point. The rail unions want bigger pay settlements for their members, some already very well paid, than other workers, many of whom are not, at the same time retaining restrictive practices and resistance to technology.
Trade union protectionism makes putting the rail industry
Conservative MP for South West Wiltshire Dr Andrew Murrison
on a sustainable basis impossible. In the long term it threatens jobs and the safe, efficient running of the network.
Residual Blairites on the Opposition front bench know this but, with their party hand-cuffed to the unions, they refuse to condemn strikes and, because they don’t want to scare undecided voters, won’t be drawn on what they would do in office.
In the absence of an answer, we have to rely on the Opposition’s track record in office, recalling the ‘beer and sandwiches’ era at Number Ten. So, the working assumption has to be that they would cave in to demands.
The Opposition has apparently conceded the obvious point that the RCN trade union demand for 19 per cent for the country’s 700,000 nurses is just impossible. We all want more money for healthcare workers – declaring my own interest as I’m still one – but huge, inflation-busting rises in one, very large sector come straight out of the pockets of others.
The UK is now spending about the same on healthcare as our European neighbours after many years of growth, though with generally less good outcomes, so we need to be careful about suggesting more money is key.
I’m still getting a few political pressure group inspired but unsubstantiated emails about ‘cuts’ to the NHS. But I prefer fact over fiction. In reality, there’s been a very significant uplift in the number of junior doctors, consultants and nurses over the past few years, notably as the service recovers from the pandemic.
In my view, as stated in my ten-minute rule bill last year, a central plank in reducing healthcare pressures is getting frail elderly out of acute hospital beds into more appropriate settings in the community. So, the focus in 2023 has to be on social care. In my bill I lay out how that could be achieved.
