Theresa May is to call on the Conservative party to face up to the “political fact” that people distrust its motivations around vital Public Services such as the NHS and education. She will be making a speech and it has been reported that it will echo her 2002 speech, which warned of the Conservatives being seen as the nasty party. Unfortunately, their record in government says otherwise.
As Mrs May has said, the public are beginning to mistrust her and the party on vital public services, but when you have spent the last 8 years decimating them, affecting the most vulnerable in society, there is going to be some form of resentment from the public.
Cuts, cuts, cuts
Austerity has been the calling card since 2010, claiming that it was to sort out the deficit, however, every target that George Osborne set was failed and with each year the NHS fell further and further into debt. NHS Improvement has reported that NHS Trusts have 100,000 vacancies and are more than £1.2 billion in debt. According to the quarterly performance report, NHS providers have maintained A&E performance but demand pressures have significantly impacted finances.
Waiting lists hit an all-time high last year and in a report titled, ‘NHS treatment of private patients: the impact on NHS finances and NHS patient care,’ nine hospitals have been reported to have made a loss on treatments of private patients between 2010-11 and 2015-16, the Centre for Health and Public Interest (CHPI), found that the losses at 4 of the hospital were significant with one trust losing £18 million over the 6-year period.
Proving it’s a myth that the private sector can help the NHS improve its services.
In the 2015 spending review by George Osborne, he unveiled their plans to scrap £6,000-a-year grants for student nurses and midwives. It was supposedly done to allow more training places to open up. But hours after the policy was announced, unions warned us it could prompt a recruitment crisis.
And figures later showed a 23% drop in applications, according to former Labour health chief Andy Burnham.
Schools have also been cut and funding per pupil is down significantly, but a consultation unveiled in early 2017 planned to slash funding at 5,000 schools in England by 3%. The cuts were part of a new funding formula that claims to 'level out' inequality in the system.
But poorer urban areas were hit harder than Conservative shires, and the EPI think tank warned once inflation is factored in, every school in England will see 'real terms' funding fall.
Plans to subdue Labour
The local elections coming for Theresa May are likely to prove to be a pivotal moment, with polling suggesting that Conservatives are set to make significant losses all across London. More concerningly for the Conservatives, those losses could be in decades old strongholds across the capital. However, Theresa May is looking to go the same way as Zac Goldsmith did in his mayoral campaign, by attempting to stir anti-Islam and immigrant sentiment.
She has been spotted campaigning with Bob Blackman MP, who has a history of anti-Muslim behaviour.
During the 2017 general election campaign. According to 2011 census figures, 13 per cent of Blackman's constituents are Muslims. Seven per cent are Jewish, and 28 per cent are Hindu.
But instead of courting the votes of every religious minority, Blackman sided with Hindu and Jewish voters while neglecting Muslims. When his office was questioned by Peter Oborne over his visits, they couldn’t confirm whether he had been to a mosque, despite publicised visits to Synagogues. Blackman also describes himself as a “Chrinjew” and an “honorary Hindu”, neglecting the Muslim faith entirely. He even thinks the number of Muslims in his constituency is a lie, when official figures say it is 10,000. Blackman claims that those figures are untrue.
However, Blackman’s prejudices aren’t minor as suggested thus far, in October last year, first he hosted a despicable Hindu nationalist, Tapan Ghosh, at an event at the House of Commons. Ghosh is a man who has called for the UN to control the birth rate of Muslims, praised the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar and tweeted: "all Muslims are Jihadis". When questioned Blackman claimed that Ghosh never said any anti-Islamic remarks, however, the tape says otherwise because Hindu defence force in India "to protect our civilisation".
If Theresa May is associating herself with an MP who has known anti-Islamic sentiment, it shows how far-right the party has pushed itself and just imagine the media furore if a Jeremy Corbyn went out and campaigned with someone who was a known anti-Semite or perhaps if a Labour MP received funds from the son of the founder of the British Union of Fascists? How is this any better?
