I remember the feeling of horror, four years ago today, as I watched the disaster of Boris Johnson re-entering Downing Street with a big majority.
The cold and wet winter general election campaign was centred around his many slogans that promised a lot but would deliver very little.
“We will put you first” was the biggest joke of all. I could never reconcile these words with what I saw from the self-centred politician on the screen in front of me. Johnson’s chaotic handling of the pandemic proved this to be a lie.
Had that really been his guiding principle throughout the pandemic, the UK wouldn’t have one of the highest COVID-19 death rates in Western Europe, his government wouldn’t have enabled the deaths of so many care home residents, and essential workers would have had proper PPE, not unusable stock from dodgy crony contracts.
What about the promises for the NHS and investing in our public services? Well, “50,000 more nurses” might have been recruited, but vacancies are stubbornly high. Demand is rising so high that staff are struggling to care for too many patients. Many of these new recruits were from overseas, but now the government wants to either kick them out and make it harder for more to come here.
Their manifesto harped on about “supporting workers and families”. But the only people doing that are trade unionists, while the Tories have been introducing draconian measures to stop us getting the best for working people. New laws that they have no mandate for.
And the big one, “get Brexit done”. That happened, but far from “unleashing Britain’s potential”, we’ve seen our living standards plummet, sluggish growth, a stagnant economy and crumbing public services.
We’ve endured three Conservative Prime Ministers since the 2019 general election, countless secretaries of state and ministers, and they are now terminally infighting over a cruel and unworkable immigration policy.
While the clock ticks to the next general election, the public are watching, arms folded, waiting for their chance to vote them out.
The article Blog: the clock ticks to the next general election first appeared on the UNISON National site.
Comments are closed.