Kakistocracy XLI:It's Yer Mone(y) I'm After, Baby

"Well I know that it's hard and I know that it's tough when each thing you're giving me is just not enough. Forget your heart, it's your bank I wanna break, it's just yer money I'm after, baby" - It's Yer Money I'm After, Baby - The Wonderstuff.

Today, for the first time ever - and the Royal College of Nursing was founded in 1916, the nurses go on strike. The government are refusing to get round the negotiating table to talk about a rise in pay and job security for the very people they exhorted us to stand on our doorsteps and clap on a weekly basis just over two years ago during the first wave of the pandemic.

They're joining ambulance workers, rail workers, bus drivers, baggage handlers, border forces, Royal Mail workers, teachers, university staff, and driving examiners in taking industrial action because the pay rises they have received during the last twelve years of Tory misrule have been below the rate of inflation. In real terms, a pay decrease.

They're fed up of struggling to feed their families and heat their homes and, in some cases, they're not best pleased at having to go to food banks. Measured by GDP, as capitalism demands, the UK is the sixth largest economy in the world so you'd think there'd be enough money to pay key workers properly but the Conservative government says no. Going so far, in the case of the current chairman Nadham Zahawi, to claim the nurses are playing into the hands of Vladimir Putin.

It makes no sense whatsoever but that's the current Tory strategy. Where once they blamed everything on the pandemic, now they blame everything on Putin. Never on their own incompetence, never on their own negligence, never on their own cruelty, never on their own vanity, and never on their own terrible policies.

Austerity and Brexit both come to mind as things that have absolutely helped destroy the UK economy but we shouldn't forget the small matter of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng's disastrous 'mini-budget' that blew a £30bn hole in the country's finances. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, bought in to fix that, says it's up to ALL of us to fix it but I can't help thinking it's up to the Tory party to clear up their own fucking mess and if they can't do that, which they can but choose not to, they should all resign en masse, have a general election, and let Labour take over.

They found the money to award dodgy PPE contracts to their friends, they found the money to pay for Boris and Carrie Johnson's furnishings, and they've found the money to open a new coalmine in Whitehaven (after boasting they would end 'coal', Michael Gove has given five hundred jobs to Cumbria but a time of drastic climate change the price we'll pay for it in the end seems far too much). Most noticeably of all, they found £29,000,000 to give to Michelle Mone and even made her a Baroness and gave her a seat in the House of Lords.

PPE Medpro, the company she advocated for and then lied about advocating for, sent that amount of money to a trust in her name based on the Isle of Man and with that money she bought herself a yacht and no doubt lots of other things that are far far out of the price range of people worrying if they can afford milk and bread.

Which she called Lady M. Because of course she fucking did. These bastards love nothing more than rubbing our noses in it. That's hardly surprising when you consider that the sort of Bullingdon bullies who have run the government in recent years used to burn £50 notes in front of homeless people.

Mone's taken leave of absence from the House of Lords now but questions remain as to which government ministers enabled her act of criminality. Ultimately, Boris Johnson is to blame as he was Prime Minister at the time but you can also make a case for kangaroo cock muncher Matt Hancock and there are certainly rumours that Sajid Javid's recent announcement that he will retire from frontline politics at the next election is because he fears becoming embroiled in the case.

Or maybe not. Maybe the penny has dropped with Javid, as it has with many others, that he'll be out of a job after the next election whatever happens. So he's getting out quick and setting himself up with some cushy directorship in the city or something.

Though there are few bellends out there who still believe the constant Tory, and Tory press, scapegoating of the innocent to protect their own backs, many have had enough. Blaming the nurses and accusing them of siding with Putin is a step too far for much of the public and it looks increasingly likely they'll be destroyed in the polling booth when they finally call an election.

But what damage will they have done to the country by then? We don't need to speculate anymore. We can just look around and see. Record waits in A&E, people lying in hospital corridors, dying in the back of ambulances, dying while waiting for ambulances, a cost of living crisis so severe that huge numbers of people will simply starve or freeze to death this winter, and ever increasing queues for food banks.

The government offer no solutions to this but continue to bully and hector anyone who dares point this out (legendary dimwit Dominic Raab's staff have even been offered a 'route out' to escape his now infamous bullying). In 'It's Yer Money I'm After, Baby', Miles Hunt of The Wonderstuff sang "I'm in love with myself and nobody else" and that sounds like a perfect motto for this vile and callous Conservative party.

They make the mistake of thinking everyone else is as devious, unkind, and self-serving as them. But they're not. Many of us care about the NHS, we care about public transport infrastructure, and we care about people who are poor, sick, homeless, or struggling to make ends meet. We should help them and not punish them. The best way we do that is to support the nurses in their industrial action and to get rid of the Tories.