We’re publishing another guest post by Charlotte Niemiec, a freelance journalist. This one is about the unseemly haste with which the Government raised National Insurance earlier this week and the flimsy rationale for doing so. How can the Government ask us to fund a financial shortfall in the NHS when it has wasted so many billions of taxpayers’ money through its mismanagement of the pandemic?
Earlier this week, the U.K. Government voted to increase national insurance contributions by 1.25% from April 2022 – a “fair and reasonable” amount that will raise £12 billion a year in extra funding for the health and social care sector, according to PM Boris Johnson. It is hardly unexpected.
I suspect many of us would willingly contribute what we could to the public purse in the face of a serious humanitarian crisis. Most stoically accept year-on-year rises that reflect inflation and population growth, especially when that money is invested in services we or those we love use now or will one day. We’re told the hike is a regrettable consequence of an unforeseen pandemic that has served to reveal cracks in the system, most notably a lack of resources in our ‘world-beating’ NHS. This should sound perfectly reasonable.
Why then, if Twitter is anything to judge by, do so many people on both sides of the political divide feel totally shafted? Perhaps it’s because we don’t have bottomless pockets and altruism only goes so far when we see our money being wasted. Forcing us to pay more to deal with a backlog that is a direct result of the government’s own poor decision-making feels like something of a cheek. The NHS needs extra funds primarily because it chose multiple, short-term, ineffective lockdown policies instead of strategies that safeguarded public health, the NHS and the economy in the long-term. Alternatives, such as the Great Barrington Declaration or the Swedish model, have always been available, but never considered.
We are to pay – again! – for the Government’s bungling ineptitude over the last 18 months, for the public funds it washed down the sink, enriching themselves and their friends while the rest of us feared for our jobs. The Government purchased PPE to the tune of £18 billion, much of which turned out to be unusable. Next it coughed up – by some estimates – £530 million for the temporary ‘Nightingale’ hospitals it never used because it hadn’t realised the NHS didn’t have the manpower to staff them. (They did, however, inspire arguably the most Orwellian image of the pandemic so far, although this may not be a real photograph.) Its next brainchild was the £22 billion barely-fit-for-purpose ‘test and trace’ system, which ‘pinged’ those who hadn’t left their homes for weeks while the phones of those in direct contact with infected individuals stayed silent. The PPE scandal and test and trace disaster together cost around £40 billion. It will take more than three years to claw this back under the new tax rate.
We can add to the tally the £12 billion spent on the first two doses of ‘vaccines’ with results that seem to be, at best, disappointing. In the final week of August last year, England saw 46 deaths attributed to Covid, with no vaccine available. In the same week this year, that figure is 391, with a vaccine. What has been achieved? The Government will now spend more money on vaccines that don’t appear to be very effective to jab those who are not at risk from the disease and reinject those whose six-month vaccine loyalty card is running out. The ongoing plan seems to be to repeat this strategy, ad nauseam, with an ever-mounting bill. Are we getting our money’s worth?
How will these extra funds be spent? Maybe on more ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ managers imploring white people to “be uncomfortable” in return for £50K salaries, while 13 million people wait for medical treatment. Perhaps it will be spent training and recruiting the estimated 190,000 new NHS workers we’ll need if the existing, fully-qualified-but-unvaccinated ones are forced to leave their jobs in the wake of the Government’s anticipated ‘No Jab, No Job’ policy. It could also be spent on the additional NHS workers we’ll need because of the shortfall we started with in the first place. The Government could scrap – or at the very least, defer – the ‘No Jab, No Job’ policy. But it probably won’t. Instead, it will choose to throw good money after bad.
Some of this cash, albeit allocated in name to the healthcare sector, could even be spent on the insidious ‘vaccine passports’ – the biggest threat to our civil liberties since the war, to go along with the biggest tax hike since the war – even though they have no medical justification.
Once again, those who have the least will lose the most. The higher tax will penalise the young, the working class and ethnic minorities, those who made the largest sacrifices to ‘protect’ their wealthier elders. They were the frontline workers, delivery drivers, rubbish collectors, shelf stackers. Many did not have the luxury of furlough but worked on regardless of any risk Covid posed them. Their reward is to be worse off – the Government will take from the poor and give to the rich.
And the rise coincides with a record 12% hike in energy prices that may very well see the elderly and vulnerable we sought to protect die of cold this winter. This, combined with ill-thought-through ‘net-zero’ schemes designed to make the PM look good on the international stage at COP26 in November – to ‘Build Back Better!’ – will see us only building backwards.
But most disturbing isn’t that the Conservative party has broken its manifesto commitments, or that hiking taxes goes against Tory principles (to such an extent that many in the tax-loving Labour party balked at endorsing the idea) or even that so few Tories voted against the rise. No – it’s that this vote took place with only 24 hours’ notice, under threat of a reshuffle. It is yet another example of the many changes Boris and his closest cronies have pushed through without proper scrutiny. In June, the Government even had the gall to send press releases to the papers outlining plans for the Covid roadmap before it told fellow MPs what information they contained. An apoplectic Speaker Hoyle found it “totally unacceptable that, once again, once again, we see Downing Street running roughshod over members of Parliament”. Hear, hear, Hoyle.
Contempt for the House is one thing, but the Government now looks set to disregard the advice of its own medical advisors and proceed with vaccinating 12-15 year-olds. In doing so, it can no longer be said to be “following the Science”. It is on a dangerous footing, climbing the first few rungs of a totalitarian ladder.
Who will guard the guards? We, the people, must protest, protest, protest this Government’s hubris before we wake to find our wallets empty, our rights permanently eroded and our liberties held hostage.
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