Hello folks! It's been a wee while
since I last blogged but I've spent the last month buried deep in
thought on a whole host of topics and can't wait to start discussing
them further!
What's happened since the start of the
year is that there have been a number of reports brought out that
make for despairing reading: figures in report after report released
by third sector organisations, charities and think-tanks have shown
the appalling effect that austerity measures, imposed by a Government
far too occupied with sucking up to Donnie Drumpf and his “merry”
band of “I want to go back to the 50's when we didn't know about
pop music and Oreos” Trumpians and placating our own nostalgia
loving elements of the electorate (who will never be satisfied until
the gates are firmly shut to anyone who doesn't have “Dr” as a
prefix or a few bob in their pockets).
Our NHS has been struggling to cope
with this year's flu season, given the addition of the Aussie flu
strain into the mix. More than 50,000 non-urgent operations have been
postponed on the advice of NHS England this winter
(https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2018/01/towards-eternal-winter-can-nhs-survive)
yet PM Theresa May boasted that the NHS had been prepared for winter,
stating “there were 3,000 more beds in use and 2.9m more people
using A&E since 2010” at PMQs last Wednesday. As Corbyn pointed
out when he retorted her point, “14,000 beds in wards have been
lost since 2010 and 100,000 patients have waited longer than 30
minutes for an emergency ambulance”. Let's not forget that 17,000
were left waiting in the back of ambulance to get admitted to A&E
in the last week of December
(https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/10/pmqs-verdict-may-holds-up-better-against-corbyns-nhs-attack).
More nurses are now leaving the NHS than joining it (more than 33,000
nurses walked away in 2017, a rise of 20% since 2012-13), perhaps
because the working conditions are stressful, the pay is not enough
given the amount of work nurses are being asked to do, EU nurses face
xenophobic language being thrown at that and nursing bursaries, which
trainees relied on, have been unfairly scrapped. According to Shadow
Health Secretary, Jon Ashworth, “there are 100,000 vacancies in the
NHS as of this month”
(http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jonathan-ashworth-jeremey-corbyn-end-to-carillion-style-outsourcing-in-nhs-and-emergency-5bn-budget-plan-trickett_uk_5a6631c4e4b00228300577d6).
Some hospitals are facing an equipment shortage, including a lack of
ventilators and oxygen cylinders
(https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/25/nhs-hospitals-serious-shortages-vital-equipment).
At a more local level, Lincoln's highly
rated Walk-In Centre will be shutting its doors at the end of
February due to short-sighted decision making by Lincs West Clinical
Commissioning Group, leaving Lincolnshire residents and voters
feeling concerned about where they can go to be seen for low-level
medical conditions without having to wait for hours at an already
busy Lincoln County Hospital A&E. 94% of people who responded to
the consultation made it clear they did not want the facility to
close (I was one of them) and yet Lincs West CCG chose to ignore us
but perhaps if the CCG wasn't dealing with the consequences of
chronic underfunding from central Government, they wouldn't have had
to close it. Our NHS is facing its greatest crisis since the 1990's
and it's time the Tories living it up in Westminster faced up to it.
Labour
have announced a number of measures that may reduce pressures on the
NHS and improve the situation for staff and patients; for example
Labour Peer Baroness Chakrabarti stated that Labour would bring “life
and death services” like hospital cleaning back into public
ownership. Labour would halt the introduction of Sustainability and
Transformation Plans “which
devolve the national service into local ‘footprints’ with reduced
accountability and the potential for marked reductions in healthcare
provision, commercial control of both the public estate and the
commissioning function”
(https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/stewart-player/taking-politics-out-of-nhs-or-constructing-elitist-consensus). Labour
have also announced they will provide free car parking for patients,
staff and visitors, funded by increasing the private medical premium
tax. Labour would also scrap the public sector pay cap on nurses pay,
reinstate nursing bursaries and guarantee the rights of EU workers to
stay in the UK and continue doing their amazing work. All of which I
believe would be broadly welcomed by voters like me.
Another issue that has been discussed
in some depth this month has been the increasing number of children
living in poverty in English cities. Figures released by the End
Child Poverty campaign just this
past week state that 4 million children in the UK are now classed as
living in poverty, a truly embarrassing and unacceptable statistic
when you are reminded of the fact that the UK is the 6th
largest economy
globally. There are 4 constituencies in the UK where children are now
“more likely than not to grow up poor” with over 50% of children
living in poverty: Bethnal Green and Bow, Poplar and Limehouse (where
the 1950s and 60's themed Call the Midwife is
set), Birmingham Ladywood and Birmingham Hodge Hill.
The
situation for children in Lincolnshire makes for less glum reading
but still there should be pause for thought:
5,907
children are classed as living in poverty in Lincoln (which is
defined in the report as a household having an annual income below
60% of the average); this means that 26.7% of children living within
the constituency boundary are living in poverty.
Louth
and Horncastle has the highest percentage of children living in
poverty for a Lincolnshire constituency (29%), followed by Boston and
Skegness (28.6%). Data from Lincoln electoral wards (Jul-Sept 2017)
shows that the percentage of children defined as living in poverty
when housing costs are taken into account is highest in Glebe
(34.13%) followed by Birchwood (34.12%). Birchwood happens to be the
ward I live in (my parents have had a lovely house here since the
Eurodance days of 1992) so to hear that 788 children in my ward are
living in households where getting adequate food and clothing is
disappointing to say the least.
Benefit
freezes imposed by the Tory Government since 2016 (and expected to
last another 2 years) have done everything to exacerbate the
situation. The Child Action Poverty Group have stated recently that
universal credit changes will push 1 million more children into
poverty and I fear what will happen to Lincoln residents when the
changes are brought in from March. The “Poverty Premium”, which
is where low-income families pay as much as £1,700 more per year
than wealthy families to buy essential goods and services needs to be
tackled but there is very little desire from the Tory party to
address the gap; instead they reiterate the tired party line that
“employment is the best route out of poverty, and they have cited
unemployment statistics which show that there are now 600,000 less
children in workless households than in 2010. The problem with their
assumption is that having a part-time minimum wage is not going to
significantly improve a person's living standards, especially
considering the cost of renting flats in the private sector in cities
across England (how can someone earning £7.50 an hour for 20 hours a
week afford a flat costing £400-£500 a month for themselves and
their child??) and the potential price rises which may come as a
result of the UK leaving the EU (clothing tariffs on items made in
Turkey may increase by 12% from zero for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/26/warnings-of-post-brexit-price-rises-unless-uk-can-copy-eu-trade-deals).
Doing well at school/university is also no longer a guarantee of
future economic stability. Even when a graduate has manged to secure
a position or a young person who has left school secures their first
job, they may still find themselves living in poverty.
The
End Child Poverty figures just add to what we already know about the
effect child poverty is having in Lincoln. The
number of emergency food parcels (which are designed to last 3 days) delivered by The Trussell Trust funded Lincoln foodback between April
1st
2016 and March 31st
2017 was 2,447, up from 2,233 the year before (an increase of 9.58%).
The number of food parcels received by children increased by 17% from
813 to 952
(http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2017/04/foodbank-charity-reveals-staggering-rise-in-foodbank-referrals-in-lincoln/).
Kate Taylor, in her excellent piece for The
Lincolnite
back in November 2017 highlighted the Institute for Fiscal Studies
projections which predicted that “relative child poverty will
increase from 30% to 37% by 2021”
(http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2017/11/kate-taylor-poverty-in-lincoln-and-beyond-why-are-so-many-in-financial-insecurity/).
I agree with Ms Taylor that there needs to be less time spent on
“crucifying people for not being in work and more time helping them
out of abject poverty” and that means focusing on more than just
funding employability schemes.
I
appreciate the situation in Lincoln could have been much worse, were
it not for the Labour-led City of Lincoln Council's Anti-Poverty
Strategy,
which has been in place since 2014. The Strategy has a number of
objectives, including “increasing money management skills and
confidence, supporting families to feed and clothe their children and
helping those facing poverty due to illness”
(https://democratic.lincoln.gov.uk/documents/s26370/Lincoln%20Anti-Poverty%20Strategy%20-%20Appendix%201.pdf).
Campaigns that have been run by Lincoln Against Poverty, the
organisation overseeing the implementation of the strategy include
The Living Wage Campaign (encouraging employers in Lincoln to pay
their employees and workers at least the Living Wage, with employers
being recognised and recommended by the City Council for doing this)
and the Helping Hand Campaign, which is designed to get debt and
budgeting information and advice to residents who need it
(http://www.lincolnagainstpoverty.co.uk/us/).
Projects delivered by the City Council included running 5 “Survive
the School Holiday” sessions which provided adults in wards such as
Birchwood and St Giles with information about debt, welfare and jobs
and a pilot voucher scheme in Bracebridge Heath helping 119 children
from low-income families get access to groceries over the summer
holidays (6 weeks) during Summer 2016. Details of 2017/18 projects
will be discussed at the next Lincoln Against Poverty Conference,
which I'd love to attend later in the year.
Labour are very well placed to devise
policies that appeal to swing voters on the issue of reducing Child
Poverty. In the last election general manifesto, for example, Labour
proposed spending £250m a year on the creation and implementation
of a Child Health fund, with funding being made available to support
the running of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in
schools, boosting the number of school nurses so there are more than
1 visit to a school (as seems to be the norm currently) and creating
an Index of Child Health, measuring progress on tackling obesity,
poor dental health, poor healthcare for under-5s and poor mental
health
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-junk-food-adverts-ads-ban-x-factor-hollyoaks-primetime-corbyn-election-manifesto-a7722926.html).
For those asking where the money would have come from, Labour would
have sought to half NHS Management consultancy fees by half
(estimated to cost £538 a year): I don't think many voters outside
of the private sector management consultancy sector would have
disapproved of that.
On policies and strategies for the NHS,
on policies to reduce homelessness, Labour have the upper hand.
Corbyn's most recent announcement of buying 8,000 homes for homeless
families as soon as his party wins the next General Election paints
him as a compassionate figure in tune with the needs of the most
vulnerable members of our society. With the rate of homelessness
having increased by a shameful 169% since 2010, the number of
rough sleepers up by 15% during 2017 (4,751 people bedded outside) and the number of people in sheltered
temporary accommodation rising by 60% between 2011 and 2017, I don't
think that the Tories can deny the seriousness of the problem any
longer, particularly with regards to street homelessness in our inner
cities. The heralded Homelessness Reduction Bill should help to
alleviate the situation but if the Government had really wanted to
address the issue, they could have provided ring-fenced funding for
Local Authorities to prevent families becoming homeless in the first
place (by paying outstanding rent arrears). As Zoe Williams so
succinctly puts it:“Local government officials are now in a
situation so impossible-statutory duty on one side, insufficient
resources to meet it on the other-that they have to conceive the
homelessness problem as a set of practical tasks to execute, rather
than a series of human interactions”
(https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/24/why-are-councils-so-creative-in-making-life-unbearable-for-homeless-people).
We have people who are forced to endure night after night sleeping on
cold doorsteps, getting little to no treatment for their mental
health issues and we have amazing people, who work for organisations
such as LEAP and the Nomad Trust who want to do far more but feel
their hands are tied by a lack of funding (again a failure of the
Tory Government to provide adequate investment for our Outreach
services).
With such a bleak picture painted of a
Britain struggling under the grip of Austerity loving Tories, it
should make sense to a centre-left equal opportunities voter like me
to turn to Labour once again and give them a chance to improve the
lives of the most vulnerable people. But one aspect of the Labour
leadership's view (and I am guessing the ongoing policy platform) is
troubling me: that is the approach towards Brexit. When I voted for
Labour back in June 2017, I did so with my eyes wide open; I knew
that the likelihood of the Brexit vote being quashed entirely was
next to zero and I knew at that time that support for a 2nd
referendum, or even a referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal was
insufficient to encourage the leadership to consider altering their
mindset towards Brexit. I had read the manifesto section which stated
quite clearly that “Freedom of movement will end when we leave the
EU” but I questioned in my mind whether we'd get to the point where
we actually left the EU (naïve maybe?) What I did think may happen was in any
clarification of Labour's position, Mr Corbyn would decide that
membership of the Single Market, along EFTA(European Free Trade
Association) lines, would be the best possible deal for the UK given
the limited amount of options on the table. I'm glad that Labour has,
along with the Lib Dems, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish
National Party seemingly managed to convince PM May to change tact
and agree that a transition deal was needed and had to be one where
the UK retained membership of both the Single Market and the Customs
Union. But I can't say that I'm not worried about the future of the
UK outside the Single Market. I'm disappointed in Corbyn's claim that
the EU cannot be reformed (ask the Nordic Greens and ALDE whether EU
reforms are impossible and they'd rebuff Corbyn straight out of hand)
and I am equally frowning at his blanket dismissal of the possibility
of a 2nd referendum or even a referendum on the terms of
the deal. That being said, Corbyn favours “some kind of Customs
Union” but not the current version. Corbyn also doesn't want to be
a member of EFTA either but wants to work with EFTA countries such
as Norway
(http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/jeremy-corbyn-second-referendum-1-5372112).
There's been some references made as to what immigration policy will
be like after Brexit but Sir Keir Starmer was the latest to comment,
back in December, when he said “the end of free movement doesn't
mean no movement. Of course we would want people to come from the EU
to work here, we would want people who are here to go to work in the
EU”
(https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/what-is-labour-policy-on-brexit).
Confusing policy remains the order of the day, you betcha!
I guess I should be grateful for any
kind of clarity being offered by Corbyn on the party's official
position but I do feel that crucial votes may end up being lost as a
result of a lukewarm approach towards the EU. Take the most recent
poll on Brexit support. The YouGov
poll
conducted back in December 2017 for The
Guardian and
Best For Britain
campaign
found that voters intending to vote Labour at the next election still
are unsure as to what Labour's overall Brexit position happens to be:
23% believe Labour is “completely against Brexit” and 10% “didn't
know”. The most recent Guardian/ICM poll, with over 5,000
respondents, shows that 39% of Labour leavers are now in favour of a
second referendum with 65% of Labour backers overall wanting voters
to have the final say on a Brexit deal (only 19% now oppose it). That
being said, in the Midlands region (including Lincolnshire), 52% of
voters polled would still vote to Leave the EU and that is despite
45% of voters thinking the decision will have a negative effect on
the economy
(https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/26/labour-brexit-rethink-second-referendum-guardian-icm-poll).
Students are also increasingly likely to vote for Remain (74%..up 16%
since 2016...although the rise comes from those who could not vote in
2016) and women are more likely to vote to Remain in another
referendum (53% to 47%). What may give any future Remain campaign a
win is the fact that 51% of voters aged 38-64 would now vote to
Remain.
Other
results from the poll make for interesting reading. For example, when
asked what impact Brexit will have on their personal finances, 36% of
respondents said negative and that includes 50% of Labour voters.
This stands in stark contrast to Tory voters, with only 18% stating
that Brexit will have a negative impact on their finances. When it
comes to asking about the impact of Brexit on culture, 42% of DE
voters (unskilled and unemployed) said that it would be positive,
compared to only 34% of AB (managerial and professional) voters. 57%
of Labour voters stated that Brexit will have a negative impact on
British culture, compared with 20% of Tory voters. There is clearly a
sharp divide socially and politically here, although it would also
come as no surprise to learn that 54% of voters aged over 75 believe
leaving the EU will have a positive impact on the UK whereas only 24%
of 18-24 year olds and 29% of 25-34 year olds agreed with them. What
these figures reveal is the difficulty every political party has in
adopting a unifying approach policy wise; there will be a significant
section of the population worried about the social and cultural as
well as economic effects of Brexit and they may feel politically
homeless if the Labour party decides to align themselves with a
harder form of Brexit. Nonetheless, the ruling out of a referendum on
the terms of the final deal seems to be a foolish decision by Corbyn,
given that 77% of potential Labour voters and 58% of overall
respondents want to have that chance. Hmm.
Corbyn is set on gambling on the idea
that Brexit voters in the North, in constituencies where Labour lost
their seat, such as Mansfield (which went from having a 5,315
majority for Labour to just a 1,057 majority for the Tories) and
Stoke-on-Trent South (which went from having a 2,539 majority to
Labour to a 663 majority for the Tories) will be so convinced by
Corbyn's commitment to Brexit that they will back him and vote Labour
at the next election and that their votes would offset any votes lost
with liberal pro-EU voters like myself choosing another party to vote
for (e.g. Liberal Democrats) in marginal seats. It's certainly an
interesting assumption. If you look
at the figures from the poll for Northern voters especially, 54%
would now vote Remain, 60% want a say on the final deal and 52% of voters
think Brexit will have a negative effect on the economy. Who would
have predicted that back in June? Anyways time will tell whether
Corbyn is right to gamble Brexit policy wise and we shall see the
effects at the next election.
Perhaps what is giving Labour the edge
in polling at the moment is a desire to enact social change to help
improve the lives of the most vulnerable. After years of policies
favouring individualism and consumerism, there's a sense that voters
are now realising the need to look after our public services after
years of lack of proper investment in them. The lowering of taxes may
have helped boost the economy but wage growth has stagnated and
voters are increasingly fearful of the prospect of being homeless;
most of us have next to no savings, which means we are often only one
or two paydays away from finding ourselves on the street. That
realisation should make us more compassionate towards those who have
found themselves in dire straits. We
should not be living in a country where more families have to make a
choice between heating their home for a week or buying healthy meals
for a few days. We should not be asking parents to fork out for
expensive bits of clothing just because they have to have the right
style of school logo on them. We should not expect single parents and
parents who have found themselves with a reduced income as a result
of illness or long-term disability to have to routinely deny their
children access to leisure activities because they can't afford the
bus fare or the petrol to take them. How can the Government continue
to justify their approach and squeeze funding for Local Authorities
to the point where they cannot afford to fund schemes that could
reduce child poverty and empower young people from disadvantaged
backgrounds to aspire to be in their dream jobs?
The
question now is whether Labour leaning Remain voters put aside their
concerns over Corbyn's muddled policy platform and trust in Labour's
overall vision or whether they look for a party that showcases the
referendum on the final deal as a central policy?
