Will you be out in your garden, your street, or on your balcony at 8pm this evening slow clapping the government for the measly 1% pay rise, in real terms a pay cut, awarded to NHS workers in Rishi Sunak's recent budget? Probably not. The idea hasn't really taken on, British people love little more than sarcasm but they're not so keen on organised sarcasm, but you won't find many people arguing the case that 1% was all these NHS 'heroes' deserved.
Still, the doctors and nurses all got clapped last year so what are they complaining about? There's not, as we've been told often enough, a magic money tree. Except, of course, when it comes to finding money for the government themselves or their chums. Then there's a whole fucking orchard of magic money trees. You can barely see the magic money wood for the magic money trees.
Boris Johnson has managed to find some money in the public coffers to redecorate number ten and a not inconsiderable £370,000 has been found to pay off the former civil servant and Home Office boss Philip Rutnam who had lodged a complaint that his boss, Home Secretary Priti Patel, had bullied him out of his job. Patel was found to have breached the ministerial code not just in this position but also in two other government departments in which she's served.
Which has made her very popular with Boris Johnson. He likes bullies. He is one. He likes people who breach the ministerial code. He's done it three times in the last three weeks himself. Under the cover of the NHS vaccine bounce he's wrongly taking credit for, Johnson has scurried in and out of the Commons like a rat round the bins of late. Emerging to lie to Parliament and to the country before quickly disappearing before he is held to account for those lies.
He has, during the last three sessions of Prime Minister's Questions, lied about PPE, he has lied about cutting funding for northern transport - so much for the levelling up agenda, and he has lied about Keir Starmer voting against a pay rise for NHS staff. Starmer, who is far from perfect but is at least honest, voted for a 2.1% pay rise while Johnson himself, wickedly, chose to treat the NHS as a political football to sew further division in the country.
To live in a country where we can't find money to pay doctors and nurses properly but can find money to pay Priti Patel to bully her staff is to live in a country that is deeply mired in corruption. When Nadine Dorries, remarkably the Minister for Mental Health, Suicide Prevention and Patient Safety, trotted out that tired old canard that NHS staff work for love rather than money surely even the world's most relaxed pacifist would be tempted to smash their television screen in.
For a party that has no concept of love except as a vacuous concept for small people it's a pretty rich, and definitely disingenuous, statement to make but the important point is that love, great though it is, doesn't buy food, it doesn't keep a roof over your head, and it doesn't buy clothes for your kids or petrol for your car so you can drive them to school. Love and money aren't either/or, they're not direct opposites. Everyone needs some love in their life, that's for sure, but everyone needs some money too. That's how it works in a capitalist society.
It's definitely how it works in a country that has now suffered over ten years of Tory misrule. The NHS pay 'rise' amounts to, on average, £3.50 per week for nurses. That's not quite the £350,000,000 promised on the side of the Brexit bus, is it? In fact it is one hundred million times less. Although as the NHS has more than a million staff let's cut the Tories some slack and say it's only one thousand times less than each doctor and nurse was promised on that bus back in 2016.
When ministers like Kwasi Kwarteng, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, appear on Question Time they reveal the Tories latest tactic. Whatever question they are asked about the pandemic, be it the horrendously high death toll, the failure to ensure an adequate system of quarantine or test and trace, or Matt Hancock illegally handing out contracts to his friends, they must immediately talk about the vaccine.
The one area of the pandemic they can reasonably spin into a positive story about their handling of Covid. Taking credit for successes they had no part in while refusing to take the blame, or even face scrutiny, for failures they have been responsible for. The atrocious and deadly mishandling of the pandemic would, in fairer times, have seen this government fall. Understandably, there was no appetite for another general election in the middle of a pandemic but was there really any appetite for the endless manufactured culture wars that Johnson and his outriders have foisted on the public at the same time?
The lies Johnson told during PMQs would put a normal minister, in normal times, in breach of the ministerial code. They would be expected to apologise or resign, possibly both. But when it's the PM, and when it's this PM particularly, well, you should know the story by now. It there was some kind of external body to judge this behaviour we may be better off but, as Lewis Goodall pointed out on Newsnight, the judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to imposition of the ministerial code is none other than Boris Johnson. Who, strangely, is not being held up to such high levels of scrutiny as Nicola Sturgeon is in Scotland right now.
In fact, the Tories are surging ahead in the polls. Writing in The Guardian, Andrew Rawnsley notes that a recent Optimum poll gives the Tories a seven point lead over Labour while a YouGov poll awards them a thirteen point advantage. Boris Johnson, to use Rawnsley's description - the 'greased piglet', to use a friend's - a 'slippery cunt', has managed to create a dangerous, and untrue, narrative about triumph in the face of adversity.
A narrative that should see him stay in power to lead us into our next disaster. Quite possibly, the inevitable break up of the UK itself. Scottish independence, as long as the Tories remain in power and with the caveat that the SNP doesn't destroy itself from within, is surely only a matter of time now and when Jacob Rees-Mogg denigrates and devalues the Good Friday Agreement as he has recently done, provoking the ire of politicians in Ireland, the EU, and the US, he risks future problems on the island of Ireland.
He won't care. Rees-Mogg's vanity knows no bounds. His empathy is non-existent. It's why he's so easy to dislike. Rishi Sunak, so far, is yet to join Rees-Mogg, Gavin Williamson, and Patel on the list of poster boys and girls for Tory heartlessness. With the furlough scheme, if not Eat Out to Help Out, people have given him the benefit of the doubt for now but it has to be said his recent budget was very different to the ones I grew up with.
In the before times, the budget was a few hours of very boring television that nobody watched. Which was then summed up on the evening news with a brief piece that told us how much more booze and fags were going to set us back. This one was about how we drag the entire nation out of its greatest economic crisis since World War II.
It's not an easy gig for anyone and we all, of course, hope Sunak can manage it - but that smack in the face to NHS staff won't help at all. Many will be so demotivated they will eventually leave their job and when you add that to the scores of foreign doctors and nurses who now won't want to, or won't be able to, come and work in the UK due to Brexit, it seems inevitable that the NHS will soon be in further peril.
Of course, we all hope not and, of course, we all hope that now schools and colleges are back to something like full capacity we won't see a rise in Covid infections. With teachers, shamefully, not being given priority in the queue for vaccination and very small children unable to social distance this seems a forlorn hope.
A more realistic hope is that the infections are far fewer than they were back in September and October and that those infected don't fall seriously ill. On top of that, if they have passed it on to elderly, or vulnerable, relatives that those relatives will have been vaccinated and will not end up, in large numbers, either in hospitals or six feet under.
The next few weeks will be a very telling time. I've no more idea how it'll pan out than anyone else but I am hoping, to quote England's 1982 World Cup squad that, this time, we'll get it right. That will mean all of us playing a part and the government are not exempt. They should be working for the people and not campaigning or trying to smear the opposition at this vital time. They certainly shouldn't be using taxpayer's money to pay off troublesome bullying accusations.
While we're all waiting to see what happens, I'm keeping myself busy. I start my new job in eleven days now (I'm both excited and nervous) so I want to make the most of this spell of extended free time. The weather's been changeable but when it has been good I've taken advantage of it. I've taken my usual walks around Peckham Rye Park and Brenchley Gardens but I've also ventured further afield to Hilly Fields, Brockwell Park,and Beckenham Place Park.
All of which were lovely. Better still was meeting up with Pam in Sydenham Wells Parks and walking, through the woods, down to Dulwich Park. It was the first time I'd seen a friend, or family member, in real life for fifty-three days which surpassed last year's record of a fifty day isolation. It was nice that it was Pam who ended both those periods of solitariness.
Because she's lovely. But she's not the only one who's been checking in on me. I'm fortunate that, when it comes to friendships, I roll pretty deep. Since I last wrote I've chatted to my parents, to Amanda, to Ben, to Vicki, to Simon, and to Michelle and her daughter, my god-daughter, Evie. I've not seen Evie for over a year now and absence, certainly, has made the heart grow fonder.
If that could even be possible! She's cute, creative, and kind and the development of her reading skills, over the last few months, has been phenomenal. I even set a quiz for her on Kahoot and she got nineteen out of twenty questions right. I was more proud of her doing that than I was of winning Ian's brilliant, and rather saucy, quiz a couple of weekends ago.
I even hosted my own quiz. Which Mike won under his Grandad's Bum alias, at a canter. On top of that I had a lovely Zoom chat with Darren and Tony (Cheryl and Alex popping in briefly to say hi before leaving the boys to it), I finished reading Paul du Noyer's In The City - A Celebration of London Music, attended an online exhibition of work by Edvard Munch and Tracey Emin as well as talks about urban myths, the maternal instinct, and the development and efficacy of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, I discovered the Internet Archive and watched the film noir classic Double Indemnity, and I finished watching both The Queen's Gambit (excellent) and Trump Takes on the World (okay).
All in all, it's been a good couple of weeks and I'm cautiously optimistic for further improvement on the horizon. If you slow clap the government this evening or not, it doesn't really matter, but please remember when you next return to the ballot box that this is the government that, in the middle of the worst pandemic of all our lives, decided to demotivate the NHS staff with an insulting 1% rise. They deserve less than 1% of the vote at the next election because though things may be improving for me right now, things will only start to improve for the country as a whole when these cruel liars are removed from office.
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