“Do you think it’s fair that the nurses get just a 1% increase year-in year-out regardless of inflation – so they get poorer, so some of them we’re told go to foodbanks? Is that fair? Do you sleep happy at that?”
David Dimbleby questions PM Theresa May, 2 Jun 2017
Conservative or Labour? In our first-past-the-post system this was the binary choice on offer to the British people on 8 June. Theresa May spelt it out for us on the day she called the election.
“It is a choice between me and Jeremy Corbyn. Britain simply will not get the right Brexit deal if we have the drift and division of a hung parliament.”
Theresa May, 18 Apr 2017
No one was expecting the “drift and division of a hung parliament.” The Conservatives, 20 points ahead in the polls, were looking for a thumping majority to do Brexit their way. The local election results on 4 May reinforced Conservative dominance. With talk of Labour being decimated, their first priority was survival. A one-party state was more likely than a hung parliament.
Yet here we are today, in a hung parliament, embarking on Brexit talks to negotiate our departure from the EU. So, what happened?
Continue reading May’s election gamble ends in drift and division
Last Monday, two middle-aged English women arrived at Abingdon market in Oxfordshire. One woman was there by chance. The other had carefully thought through the decision to go there, weighing the costs, benefits, and risks. This woman was one of the most powerful in the country. The other was one of the most vulnerable.
Theresa May is heading for a big victory on 8 June, judging by the polls and local election results. What the British people will get from a Conservative government depends largely on one key question: what does Theresa May stand for?
“Strong and stable leadership” has been the mantra of Theresa May and the Conservatives since the election was called on 18 April, with minimal discussion of policies so far, including health. However, the importance and popularity of the NHS means that it is nearly always a key election issue, as we saw in the 2016 EU referendum.
Increasingly the service is referred to as “our” NHS, reflecting its standing as a universal public service that we all contribute to and benefit from. A key concern in recent years is that the NHS is being privatised by the Conservatives, risking a shift from services driven by medical need to services focussed on company profits.
