Probably the greatest unspoken injustice facing society today is the cost-of-living crisis that affects the lives of so many, that government doesn’t even acknowledge to exist.
In an age when MPs and politicians are getting elected to be somebody rather than seeking public office so that they can represent somebody else, it is regrettably a fact that you have to have lived with the pressures that pretty much everyone without a stake in Westminster life has to deal with daily if you really want to even try and understand what is going on.
With so much reliance placed upon statistics, textbooks and the words of philosophers who have long since gone, we really do live in times where decision makers are creating public policy on the basis of ideals rather than any understanding of how real life, the real economy and the real world actually works.
When our MPs run the Country under the misapprehension that an adult can function and support themselves on £74.70 a week claiming Jobseekers Allowance, it is no wonder that they think anyone earning more couldn’t possibly have it worse.
As I argued in a recent blog, even a figure around the 12.5% that the nursing unions had wanted for NHS staff wouldn’t make any great difference to quality of life for many, when you place this in the context of how the prices and real cost of everything is today being manipulated at will, for the purposes of profit and for greed and no more.
Yet the real travesty of the Home Secretary’s refusal to give Police Officers a financial uplift, isn’t some lucid moment where Priti Patel has realised that a pay rise won’t make any difference in time, it is the outrageous fact that Rishi Sunak and the rest of this ridiculous Government have spent the past 17 months printing money and running up a tab so big that it is literally about to break the bank
Ah, I hear you say. With all the money spent on the Covid Pandemic, we are going to have to tighten our belts and pay it back in some other way. But the problem with what might at another time be otherwise very worthy sentiments is the bill is already too big to ever be paid back. What is more, the Government and Priti Patel in particular are still blowing massive amounts of imaginary cash to solve the problems that they themselves created. They are literally creating money to buy themselves more time in the hope that they can put off the impact of the problems they have caused for another day.
Blowing £54 Million on a negotiation with the French that clearly failed to stop illegal immigration, whilst at the same time trusting that our greatest antagonist over Brexit would shut up and let the UK control the narrative is ignorantly naïve. But that really sums up just how inept and incompetent the people running this Country are.
We are now on course for an economic crash when whoever has been left in charge will have to lead a revaluation of our currency, of prices, how businesses operate, how the public sector provides and how society functions and works.
It will be coming before long. And in the meantime, this reticence to pay out money that their actions have told us has no value, would do better rewarding the people who ARE doing what they can to keep this Country together, rather than pretending that valuing the efforts of public servants is something that we can ill afford
Adam Tugwell 