Public Services: Radiators or Drains?

Across the board, our public services are under stress. Budgets for the police, the NHS, Social Services, and education have all been hit, hard, since 2010. Even the NHS, to which the Conservative government keeps trying to tell us it is giving ‘extra money of £8billion’ is, in real terms, dealing with a cut in its budget.  The word ‘extra’ is a fib too:  it refers to what was really the initial tranche  of the promised funding for the first stage of a new NHS development plan.

And so we see, daily, reports of what this means, on the ground, to us, as we go about our daily activities.

Mrs May says that we must balance the budget and so the money for these services has to be cut too. Mrs May says that these services are drains on the public purse and that the endless flow of money into them has to be reduced. But is this true? Do we all see these vital services, like the NHS, like GPs, like the police, like carers in care homes, like nurses: do we see these people as drains on the public purse? Or do we see them, in effect, as ‘radiators‘: those things which actually help us, as a society? Which enable us to care for each other when we are sick or vulnerable? Those services which help us feel safe and secure in the knowledge that if we, or our loved ones, become ill or lose a job, that we will be helped temporarily to get back on our feet?  Those services which warm us and help us feel we are supporting – and being supported by when needed – a wider community.

Right now, where I live, it feels like we have more drains than radiators.

I do not like living in a city where increasing numbers of homeless people go to sleep on the streets, every night. I volunteer in a Food Bank, but I don’t like living in a city where so many people need to use one.  I don’t like the amount of stress my younger neighbours are living with – and the ways in which the  crushing  pressures of worries about their jobs, working long hours and trying to do the right thing by providing for their children affects them and their behaviour towards others. I don’t like the effects of cuts in social care which mean that another neighbour can’t get help caring 24/7 for her disabled husband because she is a WAH. We have known her for 30 years as a lively strong woman, actively working in the community she was brought up in, but now that Wife At Home label means she is exhausted and worn out – yet can’t qualify for social services support –  and she is only 70, with many more years ahead of carrying that burden.

All this in the name of Austerity, because ‘we have to reduce the deficit’.  But the Austerity strategy isn’t working.  It’s not balancing the books, and it’s not increasing productivity, and it’s certainly not increasing our sense of well-being, individually or collectively.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Vote on Thursday and change things for the better, please!