Do not be surprised by the decision of Jeremy Hunt to impose new contracts on junior doctors. This is the way in which this Conservative government, of which he is one of the most odious members, treats everyone. The politics of doing what you are told.
Those of us who were trade union members and those few who still are will know how they treated workers since they were elected in 2010. Real term pay cuts, worsening conditions – all carried out by diktat. I was a member of PCS, the civil service union for my ‘career’ and on almost every occasion the big changes were imposed, not discussed. When staff were asked for their views in the annual staff survey they were completely ignored. The police have been shafted, so have firefighters. The list goes on. Now it’s time for the doctors to be on the end of this bullying government.
I honestly cannot say that we live in a democracy in the way a democracy should operate. In 2015, 36.9% of those who voted elected a Tory government. Something like 25% of the registered electorate voted Tory, a figure that is far lower when you add to your non voting total the many who are not even on the electoral roll. Then, with minority support, they have set about implementing policies and making decisions that nobody was told about before the election.
Indeed, where is democracy? It’s not in our not very free press, where the French based non dom British citizen Lord Rothermere owns the Bermuda registered Daily Mail and his editor complains about who is speaking for England. The Mail is free of state control, as is the rest of the printed media, but only the Guardian for all its (many) faults is truly independent from big business. Your average man or woman in the street has no say in the press, usually cannot gain access to it and is, in the case of much of the press, denied the opportunity of reading impartial reporting.
You’d think that from the way the Tories are castrating the trade unions – well, the ones who are not castrated already, and that’s pretty well all of them barring the railway workers – that this country was a hotpot of industrial strife, but it isn’t. The teachers, screwed and screwed again by Michael Gove rarely took more than the odd day of strike action, as a last resort, yet the way the politicians spoke about them you’d think they were crazy Trotskyists who wanted to bring down the government. (Well, much of the NUT is run by crazy Trotskyists, but not the teachers themselves.)
The House of Commons yesterday saw prime minister’s questions pass by with no one even mentioning the doctors’ strike. I found that utterly breathtaking since Labour, for sure, support them. We know that Jeremy Corbyn does not like confrontation but here was an issue where workers were the good guys, enjoying huge public support, and Jeremy Hunt, a serial liar, enjoys no public support at all. If Corbyn decided to go on something else, what were the Labour whips thinking about? We all know that questions are planted for PMQs. This was the big issue of the day. And if MPs don’t raise subjects, what chance the rest of us?
Despite the wall of noise from the red tops, most members of the public understand that the doctors are right and Hunt is a sneaky, spinning, dishonest politician, who treats them like fools. And unlike the doctors, he doesn’t work on Saturdays at all. Why should he? He’s the richest man in the richest cabinet in living memory.
Increasingly, the government does what it pleases and the rest of us cannot do anything about it. In so many ways, this is no longer a free country and it worries me that many people haven’t noticed and even if they have noticed, they don’t care.
