Category: General

The UK Election

Many people on my Facebook wall are asking who they’re likely to vote for in the election tomorrow. One of these was a mate from work and I wrote the below on his wall. It’s had lots of comments – mostly positive, and a few negative ones. I’m very happy either way; people are completely entitled to think and believe whatever they want to on the subject. For anyone that this is of interest to, the following are my thoughts.

I voted Conservative in the last two elections. I saw their plan for economic recovery after the 2008 banking crisis as the right way to go and it made far more sense to me than the wishful thinking of Ed Miliband or the Jeremy Corbyn of two years ago. However, this time round, there is absolutely no way I could vote for Theresa May. My dad is a Police Officer, my wife a Teacher, and three of my closest friends are Doctors and a Nurse. Austerity is failing the country.

The NHS is at breaking point: it’s misrepresentative to say that there is ‘increased NHS budget every year’. As a % of GDP, it’s actually shrunk, so as we’ve got wealthier as a country, we’re spending less, but the population is growing, people are getting older, more people need ever more expensive treatment. In 2000 it was 6.3% of GDP, Tony Blair (for all his faults) pushed it up to 8.5%. By 2015 it had fallen to 7.3% and by 2021 is on course to fall to 6.6%, barely above its 2000 level. It’s like never investing more in your pension than you did when working at Tesco at 16 and then wondering why, at 67 when you’re retiring, that you’ve only got £20 a week to live off and Baked Beans now cost £25 a can. There is no simple fix to the NHS long term. We are living longer and it’s costing more. We definitely need a long term plan, but we need to patch the huge shortfall in the short term to buy us the time to develop plan B. Otherwise there might not be an NHS in 5 years to save.

In Education, my wife often works a 90 hour week, and that’s not unusual or ‘the odd occasion’ – that’s every week. There’s no quality of life, it’s become a lifestyle, not a career. There are endless inspections, endless marking and tests, endless changes to government policy on stupid things, arbitrarily. Furthermore, schools are so woefully underfunded. In a previous budget my other half has been given was just £1000. This was for all photocopying, pens, pencils, paper, board pens, presentation materials and astonishingly textbooks! (A class set of books for just 30 kids, studying a single book is around £250 alone). This for an entire year in a school of nearly 1000 pupils, I might add. Parents up and down the country are being asked to set up a direct debit straight to the school monthly to cover the shortfall.

The current funding crisis also means that teachers aren’t being replaced when they’re retiring, putting yet more strain on existing teachers. There have been loads of enforced redundancies of support staff (like Teaching Assistants) which is yet more strain and ultimately leads to poorer pupil attainment as the kids end up being taught in larger classes with less specialist knowledge (teachers are forced to cover lessons in classes they don’t teach) and less 1:1 time. And the fabled, teacher holidays? Planning time, marking time, time to actually be a normal human being again. Most teachers I know (and I’ve met a lot) work 12-15 hour days, every day (including weekends) and it’s completely unsustainable. All down to underfunding.

If you want to see how much money your child’s school will likely lose over the next 5 years – search for it on the below link. I did this to three people at work, the smallest was -£75,000 and 3 teachers, the largest was -£489,000 and 11 teachers. I don’t know any schools who can suffer these kinds of losses.

http://schoolcuts.org.uk/#!/

These are just two examples of many public services.

Then we’ve got Theresa May herself. She’s rude, she’s abrasive and the queen of ridiculous slogans like ‘Brexit means Brexit’ which is no more insightful or enlightening than the poor guy from Little Britain who goes ‘eeh eeh ehhh’. In her 5 years as the Home Secretary her job was twofold: ensure the security of the nation and control immigration – both of which she’s failed at spectacularly. Immigration is at its highest levels ever (this doesn’t bother me, I think immigration on the whole is a positive thing). But she promised to control and reduce it, and hasn’t in the slightest, so why believe her now? Secondly, 20,000 fewer Police Officers across the country. How exactly is this supposed to make us safer? The Police did an exceptionally amazing job in both Manchester and London recently, but it’s all down to superhuman efforts on the part of the individual rather than there being enough and those people being well funded.

May has made U-turn after U-turn on anything that’s suddenly been discovered to be unpopular. A shortlist includes – leaving the European Union (vocal remainer and now super hard-line brexiteer), Hinkley Point (didn’t want it, and then entered us into an insane and expensive deal), The Election (definitely won’t be one, oops I’ve got a massive majority, let’s go), The Dementia Tax (no cap, then suddenly a cap).

Furthermore her contempt for normal people during the campaign. When asked a question on literally anything, the only answers were ‘strong and stable’, ‘I’m the only one who can deliver Brexit’ or ‘strong and stable’ again.

This excerpt was written by someone working for a newspaper in Plymouth, just wanting an reasonable response on the Conservative plans for their area – http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-interview-reporter-local-newspaper-plymouth-herald-devon-soundbite-answers-a7767426.html.

Then there’s her comment to the poor nurse who’s had a pay freeze since 2009 (therefore a 15% pay cut when inflation is taken into account), that there isn’t a ‘magic money tree’, without really listening to her question, or adequately explaining why she was now struggling. You know which manifesto is costed? Labour’s. You know which one didn’t think it was important to cost theirs (or even provide detail on several policies)? The Conservative’s. For whatever reason, this time round they’d much rather you voted first and then give you the detail later. It seems to me to be akin to signing a mortgage agreement for that perfect house in the country you always dreamed of, only to be told after you’ve completed that they actually bulldozed it last year, and conveniently forgot to tell you.

And don’t even get me started on May with regards to Trump and the Paris climate agreement.

Lastly, her policies and that of the Conservatives this time round are inconsistent, and provide no clear vision for making this country or world a better place. She’s supposedly the one to deliver Brexit but can’t even extend the hand of friendship to our partners of 40 years in the EU, nor our friends and neighbours living here, by guaranteeing EU citizens the right to remain. Instead she’s using them as a bargaining chip. That is disgraceful. She’s repeatedly said she won’t pay our divorce bill and she will ‘demand’ certain things from the EU member states. I don’t know about you, but when I have a disagreement with someone, being rude and antagonistic whilst posturing and being demanding, I am far less likely to walk away with what I want than if I was fair, reasonable and presented a well-constructed and balanced argument. Although Paxman was completely out of order during the debate last week, his statement of “If I was sitting in Brussels and I was looking at you as the person I had to negotiate with, I’d be thinking ‘she’s a blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire” – is absolutely spot on.

So I will vote Labour in the next election. The Labour manifesto promises to take a bit more off people who can realistically afford it and invest in the fabric of the UK, in schools, hospitals, healthcare, education, houses, childcare, roads, railways – all the stuff that has languished for most of the last decade. It’s a manifesto that might actually provide some hope and fairness, against a system of endless austerity and unfairness. Is it perfect? No. Do I even agree with all of it? No. But to me it’s much better than the alternative.

Is Jeremy Corbyn a perfect PM? No, absolutely not. But is he likely to be better than May based on the facts that he’s relatively honest for a politician, can answer a straight question and actually has a moral compass? Do I trust Corbyn more than May to deliver a fair and reasonable Brexit? Yes, I really do. This is not the Jeremy Corbyn of two years ago: he’s grown into his role, settled and focused and I think he would do a decent job (not perfect) of running the country and supporting British values.

For me, this is about taking a small risk on Corbyn and the Labour manifesto for a Britain I want to live in and I’d like to be proud of; one that’s fair and reasonable. This, versus a huge risk on May, who hasn’t demonstrated any qualities of a leader that I’d recognise, and the Conservative manifesto of more of the same. More austerity, more wage freezes, cuts to services, nothing new, no hope and little fairness.

With those two alternatives, the choice is clear to me.

onethousanddaystothirty

I need to start with an admission. The title of this is actually a bit of a misnomer, it’s only 703 days till I’m thirty, rather than 1000. I had started with all the best of intentions though. 

If we roll back the missing 297 days it would have been around 22nd of May 2016, just a couple of weeks before I was due to get married. It had been a mental couple of years. My wife and I had got engaged, we’d moved back to my parents to scrape a deposit for a house together, we’d then found our house, bought it and moved, and then on top we’d planned a wedding. This hadn’t left much in the way of time for a personal project of any kind (I used to do a lot of running for example, but an injury put a cork in that one). I’d wanted to write something for years, I’d originally thought a book of some kind but don’t consider myself that creative, nor do I really have time (busy life). Then I thought a blog? They’re cool and trendy, or at the very least, everyone else has one, but there is a very good reason why I’d not until this point (I’ll come back to this later). With the wedding coming up however, I toyed with the idea of writing a blog on that. Problem is there are literally hundreds of blogs on weddings and probably more importantly, I’m a guy, I know next to nothing about what would make a good wedding blog. I wanted to write something interesting, to tell some sort of story and something I could do piecemeal over a long period of time. 

Then it hit me. 

I’d been joking with my wife over the fact that because she’s born a year before I am, shortly after we got married she’d turn 28 and therefore only be two years away from being thirty. Hmm, I thought, thirty… How many days till I’m thirty? Doing some quick mental maths, 3 x 365 is about 1100. Let me just check properly. 1013 days, exactly. 1013 sounds naff, but what about 1000 days till thirty, that sounds way more exciting. About to reveal this to my wife, I stopped. I realised that actually as well as an interesting statement, it was also a cool sounding name for something. A title for a blog maybe?

Then ‘the’ problem arose again and that problem is this: anyone that knows me, knows that I’m pants with social media, like really pants. I’m that guy that reads a text message, makes a mental note to reply (usually whilst in the middle of something else) closes the messaging app and then completely forgets to respond, repeatedly. I don’t really use or like Facebook, my wife has only after much persuasion got me into Pinterest and you can completely forget Instagram or Snapchat. 

Was there then, any point in me writing a blog? After a week I’d likely have forgotten its existence.

Well the fact that we’re sat here on day 703 is sort of proof that I’m crap at this stuff, but I still really liked the name so I thought bugger it, I’m having it anyway. Even If I have to start with an apology and an explanation. So Sorry. Not sorry. Definitely not sorry.