CAMERON’S great achievement thus far has been to use the capitalist slump to push society backwards so that the rich are getting richer and the poor much poorer.
A good part of the population is now dependent on ‘food bank’ charities, while hundreds of thousands work on zero hours contracts, on very low pay, and completely under the thumb of the employer.
Yesterday, the TUC observed that the latest figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), show that household disposable income increased for the richest fifth of households but fell for everyone else.
TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady commented: ‘The gap between rich and poor is growing again after a brief post-crash pause. Last year the richest households got richer, while everyone else got poorer.’
In fact all of the rich are getting in on the act. The Queen’s income is expected to rise by more than 5% next year after the Crown Estate announced record profits.
The Sovereign Grant, which covers the costs of the Queen’s official duties, will reach £40m next April.
The accounts, also published on Thursday, show that more than £4m has been spent on converting offices in Kensington Palace into an apartment for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince George.
Buckingham Palace shrugged off any embarassment saying that the cost of the monarchy – not including their security – was equivalent to just over a penny a week for every person in the United Kingdom!
Meanwhile for the ordinary people the nightmare continues.
Health bosses in East Sussex have agreed to permanently switch consultant-led maternity and paediatric services from Eastbourne to Hastings.
Doctors at Eastbourne have warned that the new services were unsafe, while nine consultant paediatricians wrote a letter saying there was a risk of ‘catastrophes and serious failure’.
Meanwhile at the BMA conference, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, Chair of the BMA’s GPs committee, delivered a warning to the government that GP services are at breaking point, and that 98 GP surgeries face closure.
He said: ‘We’re forced into providing conveyor belt care at breakneck speed, up to 60 times in a day, added to by an open-ended volume of phone calls, home visits, repeat prescriptions, results, reports and hospital correspondence. This is unmanageable, exhausting and unsustainable and puts safety and quality at risk.’
Dr Michele Wall, a GP at the Rowhedge and University of Essex Medical Practice, which cares for not just the 4,000 patients in the local community, but all the 8,500 students studying at the University of Essex, has just launched a campaign to save the practice after it was forced to begin closing on Wednesday afternoons.
Dr Wall said: ‘The funding changes will see us lose close to a third of our funding and this comes at a time when like many other practices, we are struggling from rising patient demand and workload.
NHS England has completely failed to help us get through this problem. I fear that unless we get proper support, GP services will disappear at the University of Essex and other universities.’
Meanwhile the coalition government continues with its savage cuts and lurches on from lesser to greater crises.
In the House of Commons on Wednesday, PM Cameron simply refused to reply to the opposition’s attack that he had brought a criminal into 10 Downing Street despite all of the warnings, including one from the deputy prime minister, that he should not do it. He is going from crisis to crisis.
In September, he faces a closely run referendum on whether the United Kingdom should be wound up, a referendum that he brought in!
He has also told the EU that if they make Juncker the next EC Commissioner, he will bring forward an IN-OUT referendum on the EU that will see Britain quit it.
This is despite the fact that his own bosses have warned him that quitting, in their opinion, would cost three million jobs!
He and his government are architects of disasters at home and abroad!
It remains in office only because the Labour Party and the TUC will not launch a campaign to force it to resign.
This must be put right at September’s TUC Congress. The Young Socialists will be marching to it, from London to Liverpool, to demand that the TUC calls a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government and socialism. Make sure you join the march to the TUC Congress!