We’d like to wish all our readers a Happy New Year. It would be traditional to wish you health, wealth and happiness – but are those objectives going to be easily come by in 2014?
The NHS used to be our safety net. Because it was a wholly owned public service, it could set its priorities according to public need, pay its staff a decent wage without worrying about notional competition and did not have to worry about generating a profit for some armchair shareholder to pocket. It remains, for the most part, a splendid service – thanks to the dedication of staff who go above and beyond the call of duty to provide excellent care. However, the Coalition has introduced “market forces” throughout the NHS, silently turning it into a business raising profits for shareholders. While not sold off in its entirety, bits have been hived off or tendered out and it is being turned into a profit-driven business. Expect to see more charges to patients creep in over the year ahead, and more talk of the NHS having to “pay its way”.
Much was made at the end of 2013 about the economic recovery having started. Ho, ho, ho. One economic commentator on the radio reminded us, in a review of the year, that the financial crash of 2008 happened not because of problems with public sector spending (which was largely under control) or debt (which was not unmanageable) but because of private greed (the banks making essentially unsecured loans in the hope of maximising quick profits). The public sector had to bail the banks out and stopper the hole in the economy: that was what caused the problem with public sector finances. Since 2008, the public sector has been paying for bailing the private sector out. There may be more people in work (hurrah!) – but more of us are in part-time jobs, lower paid jobs and temporary jobs (boo!). After the bailout of the banks and the bailout of the economy (quantitative easing), you might have thought the banks, once they started to make profits again, would pay the public sector back. Not a bit of it: any profits the banks are making are going on bonuses for management and dividends for the shareholders. The only dosh the public sector’s getting its hands on is the paltry fines coming through for con tricks the banks have been caught at. It is workers, as a whole, who are paying for that public sector bailout: with job insecurity and lower wages, and with lower welfare benefits and tax breaks.
Speaking of welfare benefits: if anything could underline just how much the poorest in society are paying for the greed of the richest, it is the cuts in welfare benefits that the Coalition has swept in on a tide of Victorian rhetoric. Housing benefit is not keeping lazy shirkers in luxury: it is going into the pockets of private landlords (who are exempt from keeping their rental properties at “decent homes” standard) and social landlords (who are now being expected to spend that rent money not on decent services, for they are now subject only to “light touch regulation”, but on building the next generation of social housing).
In this context, how can we hope for happiness in the year ahead? Those of us fortunate not to be suffering directly, or at least not too much, cannot be happy when we see the misery of people around us, the rest of our community, struggling to make ends meet. For many children in this Borough, it will have been a very restrained Christmas this year. Many of the parents and guardians in this Borough will now be facing the hard task of paying back what that restrained Christmas cost.
It’s not just out own community that’s being robbed by our Government. Lift our eyes beyond our own shores and we see human misery beyond measure: too much of it caused at least in part by the omissions and commissions of the Coalition Government.
If, then, we are to have a better 2014, it requires us all to be active citizens, speaking out against injustice and doing our bit to make a better country and a better world for ourselves. No one else will do it for us. They try to tell us we can’t change the world: what rubbish. There’s more of us than there are of them, and there’s no reason why they should continue to have it all their own way. The world will change in the year ahead: the battle is for what kind of change will be happening.
We can start by making 2014 the last year of this dreadful Coalition Government which has no mandate to do the things it’s doing. Inevitably, though, our focus will in large part be on our own Borough, where crucial elections are due in May. Throughout the next 12 months, East London News will be with you. Help us make that change for good.