LONDON (Labour Buzz) - Imagine this situation, you’re a hard-pressed public-sector employee working night and day to manage the country’s response to the pandemic. Then, in the same week that news emerges that the government is spaffing £29 million on a ‘Festival of Brexit’, your pay gets frozen.
That’s the kick in the teeth that greeted many in the public sector on Wednesday as Rishi Sunak stood up to give his spending review. In it, he announced that, when he’d clapped on the doorstep for key workers, he didn’t really mean it.
Sunak was sounding a little more nervous than usual, and he had much to be nervous about. Minutes earlier his friend ‘PM’ had been dismissing questions about bullying, breaches of the ministerial code and billions of pounds wasted on dodgy PPE as ‘trivia’. Now he was about to deliver economic news the like of which we haven’t heard since the days when the bow and arrow were considered cutting edge military tech.
The figures were horrifying: The biggest drop in GDP for 300 years, the highest level of borrowing in peacetime and the prospect of 2.6million people being unemployed. Even in five years’ time, the economy would still be 5% smaller.
Faced with such dire economic news, he decided to wear his failure as a Chancellor as a badge of honour. True, the pandemic had caught everyone by surprise, but even on those terms, we were world-beaters. We had experienced, he said, the second-highest economic decline in Europe, behind only Spain, and were we sitting proudly in the number one position for a number of deaths.
If you’re going to fail, you might as well fail big.
Of course, someone has to pay for all this. It’s not the rich who have seen their incomes mushroom during the pandemic, not the people who made millions flogging dodgy PPE, or the politicians who had piloted a course straight for the biggest icebergs they could find (they would still get their pay rises).
No, the people who will have to fork out are the very people who have spent most of the year battling on the front line. There was a pay freeze for firefighters, teachers and other public sector workers.
Earlier in the week, the Prime Minister had told the civil servants tasked with untangling the mess of government policy to quit complaining if they were bullied. Now his Chancellor told them to give up any thought of a pay rise in the foreseeable future.
Paying the price
Of course, it isn’t just the key workers who will be feeling the brunt. It’s also people like you, or as the Government would call us, ‘plebs’. If you’re one of the millions of people about to lose your job, there will be no continuation of the £20million uplift in universal credit which could have helped you make rent.
And if you struggle to make rent, your landlord who has benefited from a mortgage holiday can still turf you out on the streets.
Meanwhile, for those still clinging onto jobs, the prospect of tax rises in the future remains very much on the table.
On the bright side, if you’re disabled you get an extra 37p per week to spend on whatever you like. Don’t spend it all at once.
Other promises to hit the wastebin included the government’s manifesto pledge to maintain its spending at 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid. Sunak shrugged off the suggestion from Tory MP Andrew Mitchell that the cut could lead to 100,000 unnecessary deaths among the poorest people in the world.
People would find it difficult to justify spending money on foreigners, Sunak said, while splurging billions to friends on PPE contracts was just fine. This, of course, is the party of the hostile environment. 100,000 deaths is a perfectly acceptable price to pay as long as they only happen to brown coloured people in faraway places.
Don’t mention the Brexit
Of course, swimming under the water of all this doom and gloom, the Chancellor managed to forget to mention another economic Tsunami coming our way: Brexit. There was no mention of the Brexit bonanza promised during the leave campaign, and definitely no mention of the statement from the Governor of the Bank of England that a No Deal Brexit could be worse for the economy than COVID 19.
Only the Shadow Chancellor, Annelies Dodds, dared to utter the B-word.
“In less than 40 days we’re due to leave the transition period. Yet the chancellor didn’t even mention that in his speech. There’s still no trade deal. Does the chancellor truly believe that his government is prepared and that he’s done enough to help those businesses that will be heavily affected?”
Best for Britain, a non-partisan group campaigning for a trade deal with the EU, added its voice to the condemnation.
“But these measures are undermined by the government’s failure to get a handle on any of the crises facing our country. As an official Cabinet Office document warned this week, the combined impact of COVID, Brexit, flu and flooding will be devastating this Christmas. But a no-deal Brexit and continued failure to sort out Test and Trace will make this worse,” they said in a statement.
“The priority should therefore be to supplement this jobs support with policy that protects the economy and peoples’ livelihoods, starting with securing tariff free access to the world’s largest single market.”
Dodds also highlighted the breaking of many previous promises. There was nothing about the ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to build homes or the Northern Powerhouse Rail project which has still not been approved six years on.
All these things are bad enough on their own, but it’s the pay freeze for public sector workers which really leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It won’t affect NHS staff but will hit everyone else including teachers, civil servants and firefighters, who had also found themselves holding up the country this year.
At any time, such a dismissive treatment of the people who have worked hardest during this year of a pandemic would be bad. Against a backdrop in which MPs have awarded themselves a pay rise and the government has wasted billions of pounds of public money, it seems positively Dickensian.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)