Draft letter to the Wanker Of State for Destroying the Health Sector: any and all comments welcome!
Dear Mr Barclay
I am writing to draw your attention to one person’s experience of NHS salary and conditions.
Two years ago, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I was very lucky to be referred to the Royal Marsden Hospital, whose care of me has been absolutely superb. I am still regularly seeing several different departments as part of their monitoring programme.
As part of my recovery I was referred to a pelvic physiotherapist. She has helped and encouraged me enormously and I am deeply grateful to her.
She has just told me that she is leaving her post. The reason? She cannot afford childcare for her two young children on her NHS salary.
This brings shame on the Government and the Conservative party on several fronts:
- The pitifully poor pay of highly skilled NHS professionals, who do a great deal more to improve the lives of those they are responsible for than any politician I have ever encountered;
- The inadequate response of the current government to the cost of living crisis for public sector workers, whose pay has been effectively frozen in most cases for the last decade;
- The abandonment of childcare provision to the private sector, with nonsensical piecemeal initiatives here and there that take no account of the reality of working parents’ (and let’s be honest here, mostly working mothers’) lives. I would love to see someone challenge government policies under the Equality Act 2010, as this amounts in my view to sex discrimination – you are erecting barriers that prevent women from working and then punishing them for it.
Please don’t spout the standard inanities about the economy. The UK is in a worse situation than any other G7 nation, or European nation, and that is directly down to the catastrophically stupid and financially illiterate positions adopted by various different Conservative administrations since 2010.
You should be ashamed of yourselves, but as you collectively seem to have had your shame glands removed, perhaps you could at least stop enriching your chums like Baroness Mone at the expense of the taxpayer, including those taxpayers who are also public sector workers.
Yours, SqueakyDinosaur