Levelling down

I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Nicky Campbell’s 5 Live phone in this morning. It was all about the 1% pay rise offered to NHS staff after all they have done and been through in the last year. “Be thankful for the round of applause you got every week last year,” said chancellor Rishi Sunak, as he counted his own money (he’s worth £200 million and his wife £2 billion). “And if you don’t like it, fuck off into the care sector. Many of them are getting a 2.2% rise in April. And they deserve every penny of that extra 19p an hour. You’ve never had it so good.”

It’s entirely possible Sunak didn’t use these precise words, but he might as well have done because that’s exactly what he meant to say. And the government spin doctors, paid vast salaries by the taxpayer, including, need I add NHS workers, added that given other workers had received no pay rise at all last year, nor this, NHS workers should be grateful to still have jobs. Judging from the lead-up to the phone-in, Sunak’s 1% pay offer insult, quite a few members of the public agree with him. The argument being that some people are much worse off this year so let’s make everyone worse off. It’s the government’s levelling down agenda.

I’m in frequent contact with folk from the care sector, probably because I work in it, and I know at first hand the efforts these people have made to keep people safe and well. Currently, most of them earn a princely £8.72 a hour for duties that include helping to feed and wash people, l as well as assist in their toiletry activities. (I met a young carer last week who because of her age earns £6.45 an hour.) The only pay rise they will get this year is a miserable 19p an hour. Luckily, these amazing care workers are happy to work for what are frankly insulting wage levels because they love helping people.

As Sunak may or may not have pointed out, according to the level of accuracy in his quotes which may have been made up, the real reward for them, as they wipe another vulnerable person’s bottom, is that both he and his neighbour walked outside their Downing Street homes and clapped for them. Anyway, if you think that wasn’t enough then don’t worry: God’s got a special place for you in heaven, if you just carry on voting Conservative.

I don’t talk on my blog or on social networks about my current job, except to say that I didn’t get a pay rise last year and it’s unlikely to the point of impossible that I shall get one this year, either. Hopefully, that last round of applause, which was extended to include carers should be sufficient to enable me to put bread on the table.

It must have been a difficult to decision of politicians who have to struggle by on a mere £81,932 per annum, after they ‘only’ received a 3.1% pay rise in 2020. And we should show them additional sympathy given that they are no longer able to claim expenses to keep their horses’s stables warm or to clean the moat around their homes. You think we’ve got problems on or around the minimum wage?

Anyway, it turns out most people support Johnson’s government giving a sound kicking to frontline workers, following the news that a new opinion poll puts Johnson well ahead of Keir Starmer as the best choice for PM and the Tories are now 13% ahead of Labour. 140,000 people dead from COVID? £22 billion on a test and trace service that doesn’t work? Millions dished out to friends and cronies?  Don’t worry about that. Good old Boris. I expect many people would still support him if he introduced compulsory euthanasia, as long as it didn’t apply to their families.

Who cares about the carers? Not Sunak and not Johnson. They don’t care and they never did.

During my occasional visits to hospital, I have always come out thinking that whatever they pay NHS staff it isn’t enough. I still believe that. And having worked in the care sector for over five years, I feel the same way about care staff too.

Hearing a phone-in where people were actually attacking NHS workers for wanting a bit more than a 1% pay rise after all they have done for us was a step too far for me. Sunak and his wife are richer than the Queen and still they want to keep us in our place. Worse than that, most people support Sunak’s budget and something like 55% of the public think it was entirely fair to shaft our frontline heroes.

It’s probably me that’s out of step with the rest of the world and perhaps it’s actually me that’s mad for wanting our best people to be fairly rewarded. And perhaps Gordon Gekko was right in Wall Street when he declared” Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That was the very ethos by which Margaret Thatcher existed. In 2021, we find that nothing has changed.