Raab said nurses and other front-line staff would receive ‘appropriate’ recognition when crisis ends. Seems he meant yet another pay-freeze as Tories slap heroes in face
Just over a month ago Dominic Raab – at that time stand-in weasel Prime Minister at the daily coronavirus press briefing – squirmed out of answering the question of whether the Tories would concretely reward NHS and other front-line staff for their commitment and sacrifice with a significant pay-rise.
Raab would only say that those front-line heroes would eventually receive ‘an appropriate level of reward’:
But just what is an ‘appropriate level of reward’ in the Tory mind? Well, now we know: a 2-year pay freeze.
A leaked document has today revealed that the Conservatives plan to start clawing back the money they have made available to bridge the pandemic crisis, not by raising taxes on the wealthy or on large corporations that pay little tax now or have benefited from public funds – but by freezing public sector pay again for two years.
The leaked Treasury briefing document says that the proposed public sector pay freeze could save £6.5 billion by 2023-24.
Hundreds of NHS, transport, teaching and other front-line workers have been killed by the coronavirus after the Tories failed to provide them with adequate protective equipment and simply changed the ‘guidance’ almost daily to cover for massive shortages.
This is a national scandal, but one that should surprise no one. The Tories cheered the last time they blocked a pay-rise for nurses and they have not changed.
As always, they pay lip service and then pour contempt.
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Every new development merely confirms the stupidity and callousness, the self centred greed and mindless ignorance of the highly paid and comfortable scoundrels who spent the past five years sabotaging the mildly socialist programme of reform that the, temporarily, leftwing leadership of the Labour Party put before the electorate.
Had it not been for this sabotage the UK would be governed today by people genuinely committed to the welfare of the common people.
When this is over and the deaths, most of them unnecessary and preventable, are added up, the number of those killed by the Blairite right and the anti democratic Union bureaucrats will constitute a reminder of the long established fact in politics that imperial adventures abroad and the casualties from them, like the million or more dead in Iraq, are an indication of the treatment that government metes out at home.
This is the Baghdad Bounce that Blunkett worked for: tens of thousands of working people found to be just as disposable as the human ‘ants’ whose lives were lost in the bombing of Iraq, the commando raids in Afghanistan and the ISIS atrocities, enabled by the Foreign Office in Syria.
War criminality abroad always transfers into a contempt for human life at home too. That was the story of the Empire on which the sun never set, from which no good ever came to the common people , anywhere.
bevin – It is not very often we agree but on this occasion thanks for your post.
2 more years of austerity this time adding OAP’s coming now
This is not the action of a party that thinks it can keep hold of its red wall seats.
Paying lip service while pouring contempt on the working class is the Conservative way. Just as with the financial capitalism crisis and even the Labour-enabled neo-con invasion of Iraq, it will be the working people who will be tasked with paying the bill. Austerity mark II.
And, of course, the contemptible Sir Erik Armrest of the Trilateral Commission would not have it any different.
ELECTORAL REFORM of our voting system should be LabourLeft’s priority. Contemptible centrists in Labour and their compatriot hard-right Conservatives like Hancock, Johnson and Raab would be seen as the useless, dysfunctional, antidemocratic parasites, much-loved by the billionaires’ press and BBC but hardly anyone else, that they are
FPTP favours the right. Fix our voting system and we fix the RW ADVANTAGE that we give them.
Without an opposition we are doomed and need to remove the knight at the first chance,otherwise we are pissing in the wind.
I agree Joseph, and it’s a gale force wind at that.
Wait for it…you KNOW it’s gonna run along the lines of:
“But they must pay back the generosity shown by this caring and compassionate government over the past weeks & months.
Someone’s got to; and those shareholders are fully entitled to a healthy return y’know!?
ALL blue collar, so-called ‘key workers’ were the vast majority of the beneficiaries of a very long, extended period of largesse through the furlough scheme…A lot of them for perhaps far TOO long. So THEY should pay – especially those who refused to go back to work the very moment the sainted leader told them to.”
I’ll give it until the second the furlough scheme is up in October before they pull this one . And they WILL.