When Labour came into office they did so by utilising the support of industry and business spokespersons including the support of the Confederation of Britsh Industry (CBI) which along with the tabloid media are powerful opinion formers.
To do this they had to campaign on a platform of financial prudence since the Tories had claimed that they would be a ‘tax and spend’ government.
Remember that? I certainly do.The Tories campaigned against Labour by saying that taxes would rise and Labour had to put up pre-election budget proposals to prove otherwise.
This meant that they had to use the budget restrictions that had been put there by the Tories for the first three years.
Everyone knew that the Tories were going to be deposed, including the Tories themselves which is why they put up such artificailly low spending plans in order to hobble the incoming Labour administration.They then ensured that Labour would have to promise to stick with those plans, very clever politics but not all that good for the country, just a spiteful ploy by an unpopular, self-serving, out of touch, right wing administration.
Just how unrealistic these plans were was shown by the large budget surpluses accrued in those years.
Realistic plans to provide proper budgets for public services could only be excercised after those first three years were up.
The reason so many nursing staff have left the NHS over the past ten years is less about pay and more about understaffing.Having worked in Leeds General Infirmary for six years I can say that I saw it all the time.
The Tories decided to create a health market and their claim was that it would increase competition and improve ‘choice’.
Reality check folks, it was nothing more than a precursor to unbinding the glue that holds the NHS together, the next stage would have been to introduce charges for patient boarding(as opposed to medical treatment itself-it did happen to a certain extent too) and onward to full privatisation of the NHS.
Evidence of the Tory love of private healthcare, well they did introduce tax breaks for those who had private healthcare plans, they attempted to break up Local Health Authorities(LHA) by devolving general practice management down to the General Practioners who were allocated their own budgets.This necessitated the hiring by GP’s of administrative staff to perform the functions that LHA’s did
thereby duplicating thes functions many times over.
It was only done so that the GP would end up being autonomous - and far easier to privatise.
In hospitals themselves there was a layer of management taken on to manage their end of the evolving healthcare ‘market’ but you will note that hospital budgets only went up in line with inflation.
Funds had to be diverted from medical care to hire these expensive and very very expensive managers, guess where the cuts were made ?
Yup, right there on the wards.
The Tories had a very predictable way of justifying the sell-off of public assets paid for through public taxation.
The first stage was to cut investment and sure enough the service would fall apart. As public concern grew bodies were formulated to measure the performance of them, and of course the service would fail to meet the requirements.
Then there would be reports saying how much investment was needed to bring them back up to scratch - the figures seemed to me to be highly inflated.Naturally the money could not hope to be found in the public purse.
Came sell-off time the service would be grossly underpriced to such an extent that initial share values tripled or more in a matter of a few hours.
The new owners would come in and claim the subsidy sweeteners to modernise the service, paid for by the taxpayer, and then this would be paid out to shareholders further boosting the value of shares.
Look at what has happened to the rail industry, water industry.What happened to competition reducing the price of phone calls ?
Why do my water rates go up unless the companies are forcibly prevented from doing so yet there seems to be water shortages every summer due to leaky pipework ?
Why is it that public transport completely fails to meet the needs of rural communities so now the roads are jammed with car traffic.The chaos that was bus deregulation and privatisation was a total disaster.
Why was it that Scotland and Wales virtually eliminated the Tory party from their countries and now have regional parliaments ? It might just possibly be the the London-centric policies of the Tories, which closed a huge swathe of manufacturing industry down in every region apart from the South-East which became virtally all a service based economy, caused so much unemployment and hardship around the other 9/10 of the country that it was inevitable.
The Tories were the ones who passed legislation which allowed rendering plants to reduce their operating temperatures depsite concerns from academics such as Prof Lacey and thus gave us BSE.
We in the UK pay 2% more on our interest rates than the Europeans do and yet the Tories keep telling us how expensive further integration would be, only for their friends in the financial markets of course the rest of us would save on average £40 per percentage point decrease in interest rates on our mortgages.
British lenders simply hire money from the European markets and sell it to us for a premium.
The Tories are supposed to be pro-Britannia and National unity but the policies of ‘greed is good’ threw out so many casualities that it has done more to break up the Britsh Union than any Labour, Plaid Cymru, Scottish nationalists could ever have done.
The next Labour government will have to improve its act but how can anyone ever vote for a Tory party that still has in place the same mindset that was the source of so much corruption, nepotism and special interest influence.They need to change drmatically and it will not happen until they lose the next election.
Perhaps then we will have something that we really need to keep the governing party straight, an effective oppsition.