[You can read Part 1 here]

Our county Director of Public Health reappeared in the regional news this week. Have you noticed how, just a few months ago, these people were appearing in the broadcast and print media on an almost daily basis, enjoying their moments of fame and celebrity while directing that the public should do this or that, a public at times already half frightened to death by the pronouncements of central government and all these unelected officials who, for a time, seem to have been running some sort of parallel government; talking all the time from the safety of their lofty positions and never in any doubt that their salaries (an average of £115000pa and perks) would continue to be paid and that they were not in any danger of losing out financially.

Which is not what the millions of self-employed, now the new ‘unmentionables,’ have experienced with many thousands still with no help from the magic money tree that Rishi Sunak seems to have found in the garden of Downing Street.

Anyway, this particular functionary was again promoting the usual ‘stay at home – save the NHS’ which is now facing a backlog of six million patients who were unable or prevented from getting treatment in the last year. A hidden burden or scandal in itself, depending on your viewpoint and a message which is, judging by the amount of people of all ages walking around town and pleasure areas this week, starting to wear a bit thin.

One local  business owner, a neighbour since you ask, told me this week, ‘people have just about had enough of all this, they reckon they have done their bit, everyone I speak to just wants to get back to normality and as soon as possible’. Well, not everyone of course, there are still people so terrified of catching the ‘virus’ they shun contact with other people and wear masks, sometimes two, when walking around in the open air and even when driving alone in a car.

The other message that the self-employed have learned the hard way is that despite us all being in this together, some are more in it together than others. Stories appearing in the press about the amount spent on ‘doing up’ the flat occupied by the Prime Minister and his fiancée, various contracts being awarded and costing exorbitant amounts of taxpayers’ money, have not gone unnoticed by many. Watching comments on various social media ‘platforms’ it seems that there is also a growing level of discontent over the amount of money spent on the NHS during the height of the pandemic and that’s before the  controversy of how much nurses should receive as a pay settlement this year.

Apparently ‘polls’ show that 52 percent of the population approve of the latest Budget, which is interesting to say the least. I’m wary of polls, particularly the ones held on various internet and media sites, but presumably they give some indication of the public mood, which at the moment seems to be tax rises are OK as long as somebody else pays them.  

Presumably, that’s from the lofty heights of Audi Avenue where, as usual, nothing seems to change very much whatever the weather, political or meteorological, although there are a few rumblings about the questions being asked on the latest census form that some people at least see as intrusive, but other seem quite happy to provide. Possibly these are the same people that have little or no worries about the intrusion of the ‘state’ into more and more aspects of daily life, the  attacks on free speech, culture, or the psychological effect that the last twelve months have had on many people young and old, particularly the old who, often living alone, have had a very difficult time in many cases.

What is becoming clearer as time goes by is that the warm benevolence of the state has looked after its own and, despite the rhetoric, has done not a particularly good job of looking after people who are not employed by the NHS, Local Government, the Civil Service,  Quangos and the Public Sector in general.  Whenever has that been different you may ask …

Some pundits are now calling for a modern equivalent of the Beveridge Report, which was commissioned during World War II, the findings of which ushered in the NHS, the cradle to grave welfare state and an explosion in public sector employment  as everything in sight was nationalised, leading eventually to the union controlled 1960s which looks to many observers as the sort of direction that this government is now going.

Frank Field, now Labour Lord Field, said this week that it’s the best budget he’s heard in forty years, the reason for that is that it could have been written by a Labour chancellor and one for the so called working classes presumably residing in the so called ‘red wall‘ constituencies, whether it provides the stimulus needed after a year of shutdown and all that that has done to the private sector and the self employed remains to be seen, it’s certainly popular at the moment, but when the same masses find that they will be working to pay for it all then the mood will change and probably very quickly.

For middle income earners the future at the moment seems not set to affect them very much as they seem more interested in getting their covid jabs recorded on a health passport to enable holidays abroad than anything else, maybe they have never heard of inflation or imagine that high interest rates were just something that older people talked about.

So as the Tory party shuffles closer to the left and getting more Blairite in makeup and strategy I wonder if government ministers who have had meetings with Blair have recently remembered what he said at the millennium, which was that the future of the next century is socialist. Looking at what is going on here and has gone on with various governments in the EU and the USA, he could well be proven correct.

 

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