They should be locked up for their crimes committed against the health and public services, not invited to pontificate on a health crisis their irresponsible and callous actions have left us so ill-equipped to deal with.
‘Now is not the time for politics’ state many on my social media feed and thousands of other accounts. Nonsense I say. Now is exactly the time for politics because an ounce of experience is worth a ton of theory and the dire consequences of years of public service cuts that people on the left warned about are now revealing themselves in agonising reality as our NHS and social care services are exposed as woefully ill-equipped in the face of the Covid-19 crisis.
Tories Have Criminally Underfunded NHS for a Decade
There is not just a criminal shortage of doctors, nurses, acute beds and essential ventilators we also have hundreds of thousands working daily in the frontline against this virus without even proper face masks, surgical gloves and protective overalls. From NHS front line workers to the army of social care workers who care for and tend to our elderly and infirm population in their own homes. They are under equipped, under paid and under intolerable stress with increased workloads by the day. And perhaps most criminally negligent of all is the lack of routine testing of these workers due to the atrocious failure to manufacture and/or purchase sufficient testing kits in early January when the first signs of this deadly virus were flagged up by health professionals across the world.
We Need Tests & Equipment for UK NHS & Care Workers Not Just Claps
Last night we witnessed a moving and sincere show of affection for all NHS workers as millions of us stood on balconies or outside front doors and clapped for the enormous and selfless efforts our NHS staff are putting in right now to try and keep us safe. But those staff would much rather have meaningful routine tests than empty gestures from politicians who clapped and cheered for them in front of any available camera last night. They want you to forget how they clapped and cheered even more enthusiastically less than three years ago in Parliament when they voted to impose wage cuts on those same NHS staff by maintaining the hugely damaging one percent wage cap. Remind yourself of that sickening occasion here.
The Daily Torygraph even had pictures of the Royals applauding the NHS workers and care staff. Very quaint indeed from a family that has never had to rely on the NHS in their existence because they have always had the benefit of the private healthcare the rich and powerful maintain for themselves. How angry I was to read of Prince Charles recent testing for coronavirus couldn’t be expressed in print without a page full of expletives. While millions of us plebs were emotionally coping with the government message to avoid unnecessary travel and social contact on Sunday meaning phone calls to mothers instead of the usual visits and warm hugs on Mother’s Day this privileged, pampered parasite stuck his two fingers up at the rest of us and decided to travel from his London ‘home’ to his Scottish residence of Birkhall on the Balmoral Estate. If you were not a republican before Sunday, you should be now.
Prince Charles Acted Like the Selfish Pampered Parasite He Is
Perhaps the restrictive surroundings of Clarence House got too much for the Prince. The scores of bedrooms and guest rooms must be a bit claustrophobic at times. How do you possibly choose which of the many bathrooms to use? The working class living in high rise flats and cramped two and three apartment flats with several children desperate to go out and play were under government instructions to stay indoors and avoid unnecessary travel and social contact. Many shed tears at not being able to visit their mums on that day. Yet this plank of posh wood decided to exit London where the virus is most active and visit Scotland. It was not just an act of selfish disregard for others it was downright dangerous. Painful salt was then rubbed into the wounds when we learned that he was given a Covid-19 test despite not meeting any of the tests normally applied to others. He was not hospitalised. He had not been in self-isolation without improvement for seven days. Yet he and his privileged wife were given tests. That is class ridden Britain right there in your face.
Routine Covid-19 Tests for Health & Care Workers Must Be Rolled Out Now
The ‘don’t travel’ instructions are only for the plebs and ‘satisfying testing conditions’ is only for the plebs. The Royal parasites have irresponsibly spread the danger of infection by travelling unnecessarily from London to Scotland, but they simply don’t care. They know their wealth, power and status will always ensure them care whatever they do and wherever they go. But if you are the wife of my friend from Govan, in Glasgow, and your care duties require you to visit thirty clients a day and take bloods and tend to other ailments you won’t even get a bloody face mask to protect you, let alone a routine test.
Like millions of other front line workers you are riven with the anxiety of not wanting to avoid work because people need you and rely on you while on the other hand the fear that you could become infected with the virus and carry it back into your home and infect your children. The rich don’t need to worry but real people doing the real job of caring every single day do.
National emergency services like health, fire and police are obliged to plan for all sorts of emergencies and develop contingency plans to deal with them. The fact the NHS is so under-prepared is not an accident or mistake it is the consequence of Tory politicians ignoring the impassioned pleas of health professionals for years who warned against severe cuts and privatisation of parts of the service as they could foresee the dire outcomes now unfolding.
NHS Shortfalls are Political Crimes not Unforeseen Accidents
Of course, the staff in our NHS and care services will do all they can to help people and keep the rest of us safe. That’s what they do. Other workers deserve applause to. The pharmacy workers distributing essential medicines under enormous stress. The supermarket workers dealing with anxious and worried customers. The delivery drivers ensuring supplies of food, medicines and other vital goods reach the shops and other outlets. The transport workers ferrying essential staff to and from their workplaces. All these workers and others deserve recognition and applause in normal times but especially now amid this health crisis. But don’t dare ask me to suspend my criticism of the Tories who have decimated our essential public services over the last decade.
Unite to Defeat Covid-19 But Never Forget or Forgive Tory NHS Cuts
I released a short video the other day highlighting the fact that although unity is required to fight Covid-19 we should never forget or forgive the Tories for their years of health and public service cuts and some criticised me for politicising the current situation. I plead guilty of that charge. I am politicising the situation because it is political.
Our shortage of doctors and nurses is political. Our shortage of ventilators, face masks and protective clothing is political. Our shortage of acute hospital beds is political. Our shortage of Covid-19 testing kits is political. Boris Johnson may be currently exhibiting mild symptoms of coronavirus, but he is wholly responsible for the devastated state that our NHS and other public services find themselves in. I will not unite behind him. He should be called out loudly alongside partners in crime Cameron, May, Duncan-Smith, Gove, Hunt and the other Tory Toffs who laughed and cheered for years while butchering the very public services they all now claim to care for.
Read the impassioned words of an exhausted and angry junior doctor on the frontline of the battered NHS only last December in his Open Letter to PM Boris Johnson:
“Like many junior doctors who have worked in overwhelmed and understaffed A&E departments, I’ve seen things happen as a result of the overstretched conditions that I believe should be classed as “never events”. Since 2016, nearly 5,500 patients have died in England alone as a direct result of having waited too long to be admitted to hospital. To put that in perspective, that’s nearly twice the number of people killed in terror attacks in the UK since 1970. We should be outraged.”
“Prime Minister, can you please try and imagine for one moment working as an NHS paramedic, doctor or nurse in conditions so overstretched that ambulances have to endure dangerous queues and we see patients die on corridor trolleys as a result? Just stop for a moment – please – and think of the human consequences of your NHS underfunding. The NHS everywhere is desperately underfunded and understaffed – and this is on you and your party of government. Your refusal to correct these systemic problems has created more than 5,000 of these “never events”. Prime Minister, you have failed these patients and your negligence has contributed to their deaths.”
“You and your party have had nearly a decade to leave the health service in a better state than when you found it. On every objective metric, the Conservative party has failed in that, and we see this in our NHS hospitals every single day. England is short of 40,000 nurses and 10,000 doctors, A&E waiting times are the absolute worst in NHS history, our cancer patients are waiting longer than ever to be seen, you have shut down too many district hospitals, you have left us with too few hospital beds, social care is a mess, mental health care is inaccessible, and you have destroyed our capacity to provide a multitude of services in the community to keep people healthy and out of hospital. And now nearly 5,500 people have died as a direct result of your policies. This is the legacy of the “one nation” Conservative party.”
Read that letter in full guys and then you will understand why I refuse to refrain from political attacks on Johnson, his Tory cronies and the British Establishment as a whole during this crisis.
