Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
WORKING FOR YOU Figureheads ‘bored and bumbling’
I hope Advertiser readers are coping well during these uncertain days and weeks.
Each evening at 5pm, our TV screens project yet another de- facto figurehead into our living rooms; each one looking increasingly more bored and bumbling than the last.
Hancock, Gove, Patel, and our now recovering Prime Minister.
Each look bored of having to stand up and face accountability; bored of not playing the petty two-party blame games; and bored of having to announce and deliver help and support to those they have spent more than a decade systematically dismantling and punishing, who do not have a title to their name.
They are bumbling from one ill-considered strategy to the next.
Never before has it been more glaringly obvious that this UK government is not only failing to deal with this national crisis, they are exacerbating it with their inconsistent and fractured messages.
My team has been inundated with constituent enquiries; worries about income, employment sustainability and a lack of PPE in care homes; and concerns for the welfare of elders and family stuck abroad.
And what have we been met with? What has been the response of the UK government? Waiting at least two weeks for department responses that can only really be described in one word – inexcusable.
Blaming delays in desperately required benefit pay- outs on basic IT issues and abandoning those abroad, without income and healthcare access, on flight number reductions.
Drastically harming the future employment prospects of new starters by discriminating against their access to the furlough support scheme.
Things have got to change through a fairer society with a proper wage for the jobs we now see and know to be essential; like the delivery driver, corner shop staff, till operators and lorry drivers.
A more balanced home work life can be achieved too if the government we have, and the decisions we take, are progressive.
And this is a far more achievable reality than the Tories would have us believe. We have been taught in these past few weeks that austerity has always been a political decision, not a societal necessity.
Workers and local businesses are just as capable of being subsidised as multi-national banks and companies sharing surnames with those sitting in the House of Lords. Homelessness can be eradicated within a matter of days if the intention is there; a magic money tree isn’t necessary to fund our national health service.
However, let us not forget that, at some point, this crisis will abate and we will be living a new “normal”.
I hope that the most revered in society will no longer be based on income or societal status; that shop delivery drivers are recognised as being as vital to our economy as company directors; and that health and social care staff are more worthy of pay rises than elected officials.
I hope that a true altruistic government will be our future as a Conservative-led nation will never be the answer to our problems.