It’s very easy to see how this tragedy could happen if you’re any way involved in public service. The ambulance service has been on its knees for years, GP services more so, social care is barely existent and decent social work practically impossible.
That creates an environment where people are making decisions under enormous pressure, with little ongoing training. Do you send your one ambulance to the person you know is having a heart attack or the call that got abandoned. Add in some Reform thinking about race and immigration (which has seeped into every area of our lives) and the decision becomes easier because on a subconscious level there’s a rhetoric of British services for British people.
And so the decision (and the blame) comes to the individual who made the decision, not the financial, political and social systems they operate in.
It happens because people want every service under the sun, but don’t want to pay for them. Reduce your working hours and claim universal credit, top up your pension to avoid the next tax band, work cash in hand - the tax man takes too much anyway, campaign for more subsided childcare, create hell if there’s any talk to a benefits restructure, and for God’s sake don’t touch the winter fuel allowance. Immigrants should get nothing from the UK purse, send them back where they came from, people in small boats, let them drown. It all influences the day to day resources available, and the mindsets of the people deploying those resources.
People really don’t make the link to tragedies that then follow, ambulances not sent, services not doing welfare checks, children being left in squalor. And then the public, with scant information about the circumstances, the pressures of the job, the balancing that these workers do every single day, spout about how they hope those workers never sleep well again.
We get what we’re prepared to pay for, and these lovely, desperate people paid the price. That’s how it can happen.