Having exhausted my patience with Britain’s striking railway workers, and cursed the postal workers for not delivering last week’s Private Eye at all, PCS supremo Mark Serwotka’s decision to call strike action in parts of the civil service over Christmas almost turned me into a frothing-at-the-mouth Daily Mail reader. How can staff in the Borders Agency go on strike and risk buggering up people’s Christmases? I appreciate that many, if not most, workers are seeing their pay decrease in real terms as inflation bites into their wages, but there’s a time and a place, right? But then I tut-tutted once too often. Serwotka claimed that 40,000 of his members were using food banks because their pay doesn’t cover the cost of living and God knows how many staff are claiming Universal Credit (UC) and in some instances earning less than the claimants they are paying. I don’t know about Serwotka’s figures but the facts are there.
Many workplaces are operating their own food banks for colleagues, as well as breakfast clubs for those unable to eat before they go to work. I’ve heard some awful anecdotes about civil servants giving what they had to their children for breakfast and then going without themselves and worse still parents and children not eating at all. This is happening in the very department, the DWP, where some of the lowest paid public servants in the land pay benefits to some of the poorest people in the land. When George Osborne famously lied, “We’re all in this together”, I’m not sure he meant it quite like that.
Is it just me or does it feel like the country is falling apart? I don’t even know where to begin with examples. Record numbers of people using food banks, the NHS on its knees, workers going on strike to ask for higher wages. Christ on a bicycle: the government’s current policy on house-building is to simultaneously build and not build. Water companies are tipping record amounts of shit into our rivers and oceans, so not only is the country falling apart, it stinks, too. Everywhere you look, something isn’t working, Trains are late if they turn up at all, always assuming you can afford to use them and who knows when the next bus will arrive. And at the top, a prime minister, elected by no one, surviving only by pandering to the unhinged right-wing of his parliamentary party. Then we find that people who pay out social security benefits have to claim themselves and have to use the food banks they advise claimants to use. This is not how one of the richest parts of the world should behave. It’s more like a tinpot Central American dictatorship. It doesn’t have to be like this.
There used to be a thing called fairness. Younger readers may not be aware of the concept. Until 2010, there were virtually no NHS waiting lists, few food banks, inflation was low, as was unemployment. The financial crash of 2008 had caused immense damage but Gordon Brown’s government was steering the country back on course when time ran out, as the country elected an austerity-heavy Conservative government in which some Lib Dems had jobs. Since then, the country has slowly gone to rat shit. Most of the things that don’t work today are down to David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak. Things fall apart for a reason.
Reluctantly, I offer a brief wave of support to the strikers, especially my old colleagues in the DWP, whose hard left union the PCS has failed them dismally for decades. I suspect much of Serwotka’s fire and brimstone rhetoric is mere bluff and bluster, but we have to hope that a government as useless as this one acknowledges the fact that their own workers are among the poorest people in the land and does something about it.
At least the blame game won’t work for Sunak anymore. The public aren’t stupid. They know that frontline workers who make their lives bearable are being badly treated by the government and moreover they understand how these workers have said they’re not putting up with it anymore.
No more 8.00pm rounds of applause for key workers because that won’t put bread on the table, something that Sunak, who is worth circa £750m, could never understand. The very least we want from our government is competence but that’s well beyond this lot. And meanwhile, workplace food banks are a thing. I can’t remember anything like this in my life. The more we find out the worse it gets. It’s certainly worse than I ever imagined.
