Our public services have been decimated under the Tories, and today’s announcement on spending from the new Chancellor, Sajid Javid was nothing more than an election stunt.
Even if Boris Johnson’s Government do deliver any of what they have promised, which is highly doubtful, it’s nowhere near enough to make up for almost a decade of slash and burn.
The £1billion bung for social care won’t come close to reversing the £7 billion of cuts since 2010. Councils face a £2.6 billion gap for social care this year alone. It is a drop in the ocean.
The money that he has promised for education is far less than what teachers say is needed to reverse the savage cuts schools have endured under Tory rule. The funding will do nothing for those who have had their life chances ruined by Tory education policy.
Drilling into the detail of the spending commitments on policing reveals that even if the money materialises to make it happen, only 13,000 of the promised 20,000 officers will be on the frontline. That doesn’t replace what we have lost in police numbers and can never compensate for the loss of experienced staff across our police force.
The same can be said of prisons. The Prison Officers Association has been repeatedly ignored by successive Tory Government’s on safety, yet the Chancellor thinks the answer is more prison places in privately run super prisons, which they have been told are dangerous and don’t work.
The Chancellor wants to ‘kick-start an infrastructure revolution’ but he wants it to be driven by ‘private investors’ and ‘independent institutions.’
This will ring alarm bells for anyone who regularly struggles to get to work on time or back home to their families on our shambolic and unaccountable privatised rail network.
And finally, the NHS. Despite a 6 billion maintenance backlog across our NHS estates, the Government announced just £1.8 billion for our health service, the majority of which had already been promised under the previous administration.
The bottom line is that all of these are hollow promises, totally inadequate and meaningless in the context of the unprecedented political, constitutional and cultural crisis we now find ourselves in. Boris Johnson lost his majority yesterday and then in an extraordinary act of sabotage, expelled 21 moderate Tory MPs from the party. He now has a working majority of minus 43. He cannot govern.
We are hurtling towards a General Election – something that cannot be allowed to happen before the EU withdrawal date of the 31st October. The danger of a disastrous No-Deal Brexit is a threat to the jobs and living standards and security of the people of Bedford and I will do all I can to stop it.