Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

NHS

Is anyone still surprised by the sheer nastiness of the Tory Party?

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Millions to their friends, cuts for the needy: it’s a catchy slogan

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

That the Tories are even considering reducing Universal Credit at this time is, perhaps, not shocking. They are Tories, after all. That they are not pushing through pay rises for nurses at a time when not only are health worker hours and commitment stretched beyond imagining is probably par for the course for Tories. This Tory government has now led us to the highest death rate, if not in the world, then at least in Europe. With, I might add, no apology, no acceptance of blame, and certainly no sign of contrition.

And this evening, Tories voted down a move to keep the NHS off the table in future trade deals. You know, the NHS we were clapping for only recently. The reward for valiant service to the nation is for the nation’s leaders to consider you worthy to be sold off to private enterprise. Nice touch, Tories.

I’m not in cheerful mood, as you can tell.

Thinking on these things, I dug out this quotation from my notebook, taken from Astra Taylor’s quite superb book Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.

“The idea of liberal democracy posits free subjects rationally deliberating and deciding what is best for them. Yet a motivated subset of self-interested elites has dedicated itself to sabotaging broad understanding and deliberation, knowing that there’s money to be made fr4om incomprehension, bewilderment, and strife.”

One of the ways that the ‘self-interested elites’ sabotage the abilities of the majority of us to engage in rational discussion is to undermine education while at the same time ensuring that we are never presented with the full picture. We are shown the world in 2-D, projected against a flat screen in which the world ‘out there’, populated by the people and things that are said will threaten us. There’s no room for nuance, for subtlety. As Taylor goes on to say in the book,

“Today’s purveyors of ignorance are part of a deep tradition, though they are subtler than their predecessors. The ruling class has never been particularly keen on the prospect of ordinary people becoming educated and governing themselves.”

And because there is another quotation in my notebook close to those from Taylor that is perhaps a neat summary of how I’m feeling at the moment, I’ll share that, too. This is from Erik Olin Wright’s How to be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century — something more and more of will need to be are we to survive as a species.

“Anticapitalism is possible not simply as a moral stance towards the harms and injustices in the world in which we live, but as practical stance towards building an alternative for greater human flourishing.”

Amen to that.

2020 — Gratitude and Anger

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It’s too early to make a call about whether we’ll look back on 2020 as the year from hell or as the year in which things started to become even worse and what we thought was hell was merely hell’s reception area.

And was what befell us this year completely unforeseen? Well, yes, in some ways. But a pandemic was becoming increasingly likely as ecological damage continued, and its effects could be — and were — fairly accurately modelled both at the economic and health levels by large numbers of both national and international health organisations. In other words, the scale of the detrimental effects of this particular pandemic are a result of political decisions. And if we look especially at the UK and the USA — where the death toll and the economic impact for anyone already living on benefits or one pay check away from eviction and food banks — we can see that it is more than political. The profits-led, private-industry-focused, and corruption-riddled responses to the pandemic have been driven by ideology.

When the Tories and other parties of the neoliberal death cult talk of the economy they don’t mean the health of the nation as a whole. Their idea of economy is the profit-gobbling transnational corporations that destroy the planet, shatter communities when they shift production in search of smaller overheads, seek to continually depress wages, and campaign feverishly against the rights — and safety — of workers.

Living in the UK now means living in a country that is likely to see one of the world’s highest death rates from Covid-19 — and that was before the onset of new, apparently more aggressive strains of the virus began popping up like unwelcome molehills in the immaculate lawn of our self-regard. And, of course, to add that little extra irony, a major health crisis hit these shores after the Tories had spent the previous decade seeking the best ways to undermine, underfund, and ultimately sell off the NHS. Hospitals were hugely understaffed before the pandemic hit. NHS staff were already working over one million hours of unpaid overtime every week before the pandemic arrived in the UK. One million hours. Every week. Nurses and midwives account for over 400,000 of those hours. You know, those nurses that have lost their bursaries and been refused a pay rise by the Tories?

Add to all this a Tory government led by ministers both corrupt and incompetent — and with a majority in parliament that makes them almost untouchable — and it is hard to see what anyone could be grateful for. It hasn’t helped, of course, that the so-called leader of the opposition is not much of a leader and seems to believe that the best way to oppose austerity, corruption, and incompetence is to abstain in crucial votes or, when he is particularly exercised by the blatant lies engaged in by the Tory front bench, to tut.

So much for anger. Or, at least, the fertile ground on which my anger is laying its ever stronger foundations.

But gratitude I do have. It may be a short list but it’s full of important things. Here it is:

  • My health and that of my family. My wife, my three adult children, and I have all escaped illness so far this year.

  • I have a built-in support network in my — for now — Zoom-based twelve-step meetings. The humour in the rooms and the ability to right-size problems and put things in perspective has been, if not exactly a life saver, a balm for my sanity.

  • The love of my wife. She shows me how to love and be loved. After twenty-nine years of marriage, our marriage grows stronger every year. We have faced this year together.

  • I love reading and I love books and this year I have found in the books I’ve read worlds of hope and joy and knowledge. Not escapism, perhaps, so much as a source of strength for all the best that we can be. Turning from a news report containing the flippant evil of a Boris Johnston or a Donald Trump (or any of their toadying, self-serving acolytes) to the essays in My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy or a novel like Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House, for instance, is to inhale hope like fresh air in a world that seemed enmeshed in the smoke of a billion fires.

The danger is that I let my gratitude crowd out my anger. That way lies silence and silence is fatal to us all at this time. I hope, therefore, I will have the strength throughout this year to add my voice to those who are agitating for change, for an end to free-market capitalism — of any sort of capitalism, to be honest — and for saving the planet for our children.

Happy New Year.