‘In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone,’ Children at school carol services, churches and cathedrals are singing Christmas carols, trees are being carried home and decorated.

Loving messages are being written on cards and gift tags for the living. People are being remembered, missed, mourned, longed for. There are no words for the families of those little children in Birmingham who went out to play and fell through ice. The story of one boy who died trying to help his friends is beyond heart-breaking.

Every minute of every hospital shift, healthcare professionals are dealing with death, with pain, with devastation and raw need. We expect so much of them. We train them to compartmentalise. To find a way to process their emotions fast so they can pass from one desperate situation to the next. They do this with compassion, with courtesy and with care. Increasingly they do this in intolerable conditions and for reduced pay. More and more nurses and ambulance drivers, porters and paramedics are needing food banks to help with bills.

It is not news that our NHS is falling apart. It is also not news that recruitment to permanent posts in the NHS has been failing to match demand for years. Whether you wanted Brexit or not, it is a fact that European nurses and doctors left the UK in their thousands after we voted to leave the EU and have yet to be replaced. It may be six long years since the country (just) voted to leave but the government still seems surprised that there are negative consequences.

(Oh, and wherever is that £350 million a week for the NHS that the Conservative Brexiteers promised us?). I’d love to know how many MPs who voted Brexit rely on private hospitals and GPs for their care. So, what’s the answer? Well for one thing, after years of vacillating, I’d definitely ban the bomb. I simply don’t find it credible that Putin would turn Europe into a nuclear wasteland.

What would be the point of that? Who’s going to want to occupy a nuclear winter? If anything, given the lesson from the Ukraine, it’s ground forces we need, not Trident. Yet this government has reduced conventional forces over the last 10 years, seeing defence budgets recover to their pre-2012 levels only recently, a period which has seen British Army personnel reduced by approximately 20,000. Whilst the increasing cost for ‘shiny toys’ like Trident and the Aircraft Carriers grow, further cuts of 7,000 are planned for the Army by 2025.

On a smaller level, there are savings to be made with different choices. For example, private schools having charitable status is absurd. VAT should definitely be applicable. I had a private education – there was nothing charitable about it at all! The good will of nurses and teachers has been exploited for decades. The assumption that they won’t strike has enabled the government to treat them with contempt. If MPs could only use state schools and NHS hospitals I wonder if more funding would mysteriously become available…

I didn’t stand at my door to clap the nurses during COVID, it seemed to me like a cynical PR ploy by the government to deflect from their mishandling of personal protective equipment. I do however support standing with nurses on a picket line if it comes to it.

I cry shame on those Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs who won’t show their support in person. You either support withdrawal of a person’s labour via a strike or you don’t. I would bet Christmas that not one individual nurse wants to strike, to lose their pay and be vilified in the right-wing media. I support them.

Sources:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/280455/1_june_2012.pdf

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8166/CBP-8166.pdf

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/974661/CP411_-Defence_Command_Plan.pdf