No Lunch Today
If your children are in infant school in England, they will no longer be given free school lunches. Mrs May has decreed that, if elected, she will take away school lunches and replace them with breakfasts. I don’t think what passes for breakfast under this pledge – a bit of cereal and juice – adds up to much more than increased tooth decay for our children, worth pennies and very little, in nutritional terms. Lunch gives us all – workers and children – a much needed energy boost in the middle of the day. Plenty of studies point to the link between good nutrition and better health, as well as improved performance, at school.
And this Big Idea comes on top of so many cuts to the Education budgets that the pips really are screaming in our schools. A recent analysis by the Guardian reveals that Head Teachers across England
“resorting to desperate measures and making greater demands on parents to save money as budgets are squeezed”.
These Head Teachers are being very imaginative and inventive. According to the Guardian’s analysis, they are shortening lunch breaks, dropping less mainstream subjects, and now, asking parents to foot the bill for “services” as varied as ingredients for cooking, the costs of materials for “creative studies” and even to fund subjects like PE and Latin for some year groups. In Wandsworth, primary school children are being asked to help clean the classrooms because budget cuts mean the schools can’t afford more cleaning staff. Parents of schoolchildren in Taplow (within Mrs May’s Maidenhead constituency) have been asked to contribute £30 per month to plug the gap in next year’s budget, projected to be a £40,000. shortfall – or face making teachers redundant.
The Head of the National Association of Head Teachers is used to speaking out on behalf of his members, but its time we heard him. He reports that slashing school staff budgets was bad enough but is still not sufficient to pay the bills:
“Almost every Head I speak to is thinking about not replacing teachers who leave”
Some are having to lay off staff as well. And this is happening now, today, not something projected for 2020. Larger class sizes makes it harder for teachers to teach and pupils to learn. The National Audit Office’s calculations project a £3 billion real terms reduction in school budgets by 2019, due to existing Conservative policies on education spending.
So what are we voting for today? The Conservatives are promising £1 billion per year additions to school budgets. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this amounts to a 3% further fall in school funding by 2020. Labour is promising to increase education funding by £4.8 billion per year, funded by reversing cuts to corporation tax. This is not funny money, or the ‘magic money tree’ of Tory jibes. The magic money tree is a label better suited to the quantitative easing of the past 7 years! This is a costed proposal, based on common sense, and a very different set of values.
Well that’s how it looks to me. But however it looks to you, do get out and vote today! Its pouring rain and pretty miserable outside, but go for it anyway and make a difference: you’ll feel better for it, if nothing else!
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!
Is Brexit Really What Its All About Prime Minister??
Mrs May has called this snap election to, she tells us, strengthen her hand at the negotiating table with our EU soon-to-be-ex colleagues. But she already had a Parliamentary majority and, seemingly, faced very little effective opposition to anything she put forward in terms of Brexit. We got it: we were leaving, face it and man up.
But that’s not really what this election is about. Really Mrs May just wants a bigger majority to strengthen her hand in her larger aim: she wants a smaller state. Is that what we citizens want though?
Us citizens, trying to get GP appointments, trying to ride the trains, with a seat (if we’re really lucky!), trying to get help for a loved one who needs it, trying to get a hospital appointment, or supposedly ‘non-urgent’ surgery. The Conservatives have spun us a tale that the pressure on our public services is all down to the influx of immigrants. But if you look around you, is that what you see?
What I see is the effect of cuts, to each and every one of our public services, and all in the name of Austerity. Because ‘we must reduce the deficit’! But must we, really? When so many public sector workers are telling us of the stress they are working under, that they can’t do their jobs to the standard they believe they should because colleagues are either off sick or been made redundant. Public services are labour intensive. To deliver a service means some person has to be there, in place, to provide it. And yes, that does imply a wage bill to match. Cutting the money to pay for those services means there are fewer people to provide them. And this is then reflected in longer waits for care. And sometimes it also means a poorer level of care, too.
In the case of the NHS, capping pay has already adversely affected nurse recruitment. Retention of existing nurses is hit, too. I recently met a nurse who told me that she had worked for the NHS for 25 years but had had to give it up. “I found myself in charge of a whole ward, overnight, by myself and got so worried and upset that I drove off the road on the way home one night. I had to recognise that I couldn’t go on like that; for the sake of my family, I had to leave”. She had two teenage daughters to support.
But for each nurse who leaves, and isn’t replaced by another full time equivalent, the NHS is forced to buy in agency nurses – who cost more. This is having a hugely disruptive effect on hospital planning and financing. This downward spiralling situation is not a given. It doesn’t have to be like this. It is a direct result of the decisions taken since 2010 in the name of Austerity and the erroneous belief that we have to ‘reduce the deficit’. The decision to shrink the State is not a financial imperative, it is one driven by dogma. If we want to improve our public services, to ensure that they are functioning adequately when we, our neighbours, or our loved ones need them, don’t vote for Mrs May!
acyiqeb 
Recent Comments