- The Tories are far worse than simply incompetent. Archived Message
Posted by Peter Cleall
on September 23, 2020, 3:33 pm
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The Tories are far worse than simply incompetent Of course the government is badly organised, but its response to the pandemic is deliberate — it is ideological cronyism on an industrial scale and the left needs to call that out, writes JON TRICKETT MP SOME people in senior positions in the labour movement are arguing that our central attack on the Tories should be to show that they are incompetent and that Labour would be much more capable of handling the multiple crises facing the country. The charge is incompetence — and the verdict is that they are guilty. However, it is far from clear that this ought to be the central point of Labour’s critique. Let’s start with the charge. This bunch is perhaps the most incompetent shower ever to be elected into office in our country since universal suffrage was introduced. Look at the exams fiasco this summer. Or the attempt to stampede kids back to school before the holidays when the schools simply were not ready. And how else can you explain the ghastly and unnecessary death toll from Covid-19? Too many senior Tory politicians were sent off to public school as children. They came to think that they were born to rule. But they don’t all learn how to do the detailed work which is necessary to be an effective administration. All this is true. But the charge of incompetence ought not to be the end of the matter. Far from it. Look at the ludicrous comment made by David Cameron the other day. The pandemic, he said, was “the rainy day we had been saving for. Austerity prepared Britain for Covid-19.” Well, how out of touch with lives in working-class communities everywhere could you possibly be? The real core of this government’s problems lies in its ideology. Our purpose must surely be to mount a bigger argument against the Tories than that of maladministration. And we can do this by showing that there is another way of running the country which will lead to different and better choices. We can illustrate this in a number of ways. Let’s start with the often repeated phrase that there is no “magic money tree.” This assertion has been used to starve the NHS, care service, education and the criminal justice systems of funds for many years. It left our communities lacking in the resilience we needed to face the virus. It was said there was no magic money tree when the wages and salaries of the key workers were held down year after year. Now they are whispering that they may not increase benefits in upcoming budgets. But somehow when it comes to the Tories and their mates in big business a very different rule applies. Suddenly a tree dripping with cash has appeared as if by magic. Take Chris Grayling. The minister who was always failing. He was found a job, at £100,000 per annum for seven hours a week — the equivalent to four people working full time for a year on average pay in my constituency — on top of his salary as an MP. And then there is the healthcare firm Randox, which employs Owen Paterson MP as a paid consultant, which was awarded a £133m contract without any other firms being given the opportunity to bid for the work. He reportedly earns £8,000 per month from them. And what about firms with reported personal links to Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings? Public First, a public affairs agency run by two directors with close connections to Cummings, has recently been handed contracts worth almost £1m, apparently without any consideration of alternative suppliers. The list goes on and on: the Mirror has written of more than a dozen companies with links to the Conservative Party that have won almost £500m in contracts for equipment during lockdown. This isn’t incompetence. It’s “hands-in-the-wallets-of-taxpayers time.” It’s cronyism on an industrial scale. But it’s also highly ideological in character. It’s about attacking the public sector, reducing the spending power of working people and shifting income and wealth towards the rich. It’s what the Tories always do — but with brass knobs on. And they are using the pandemic as an excuse to do it. Under these circumstances, it is the job of socialists to call out the true nature of this government. Make the charge of incompetence stick, yes. But it’s more than that. They are using the Covid-19 crisis to launch an assault on the basic principles of the NHS itself. They always say that you should never waste a crisis — and that is precisely what Cummings understands. There are five disastrous political choices which illustrate the point. First, they are attempting to break the central ethos of the NHS which is to engage in public service, free at the point of need. What else could Matt Hancock have meant when he said last week that any service which is free will inevitably cause queues — he was talking about the backlog in test and trace. Second, as we have seen they are handing over contracts for health provision to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds to private companies whose primary ethos is not of service but of enhancing shareholder value. They are milking taxpayer money in their private interest. Third, they are ransacking public health institutions like Public Health England and replacing them in the middle of a pandemic with no parliamentary accountability and handing them over to — in this case — a Tory peer with a record of failure. Fourth, they are too often treating the heroic staff as if they were expendable domestic servants. How else can you explain the failure to provide PPE or even Covid-19 tests when necessary? And what about the fact that so many key workers who have kept our country functioning throughout the pandemic are so badly paid and that many now face redundancy as furlough comes to an end. Clapping hands outside Downing Street for the cameras simply won’t cut it. Finally, they have left poorer communities stripped of the resilience that they need to fight the virus. In the care homes, where our most needy elderly people live. Amongst our front-line workers. Or in the north of England where the virus is worst and we are already going into lockdown again, but less than 20 per cent of the calls for testing produce an appointment. Readers of the Morning Star will have noted, by the way, that while in large parts of England we are struggling to get a test, that 100 per cent of the kids and staff at Eton managed to procure one. It was a working-class socialist who established the NHS. Nye Bevan said the NHS would survive as long as we are prepared to fight for it. He was right. It is the left which must now show not only to Labour but to the whole country that it is us — the socialists — who understand the moment we are living through and who have the answers. We can, and indeed we must, lead the way: remember the old slogan that the “cause of labour is the only hope for the world.” Jon Trickett is MP for Hemsworth in West Yorkshire. |
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