Nurses’ pay squeeze and Tory tax cut ambitions: can they perhaps be related?
B efore we get on to Brexit – don’t worry: we shall – I want to draw attention to what I regard as the epitome of the meanness and duplicity of what is indubitably the worst government of most of our lifetimes.
Sorry, did I say “government”? A neighbour asked me the other day if I was aware of a new oxymoron. Tell me, I replied. “The very phrase ‘Conservative government’,” he said.
Anyway, it appears that while the “government” has been boasting about its “landmark” award to the teaching profession, this turns out not to be an award at all. The money must come from existing educational budgets – in other words, from further cuts to the money our valued teaching profession has available for, well, schoolbooks, school meals and other necessary investment in the education of our younger generation.
It is all part of an ideological assault on the public sector that has been in progress – if that is the word – since the advent of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat austerity coalition of 2010-15, and then the full-blooded extreme rightwing continuation of austerity from 2015. This nasty policy permeates most parts of the public sector. I won’t bore you with the daily catalogue of its manifestations, but what I and many economists feel strongly about is the damaging and unnecessary squeeze on public sector pay.
There is absolutely no causal connection between decent pay awards to nurses and a so-called inflationary spiral. But there is – and I find this seriously offensive – a connection between this government’s policy of being as parsimonious as it can get away with on public sector pay awards and its desire to attempt tax cuts on the eve of the next general election. Yes, the “war chest” thinking is that cynical.
Which brings us
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