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Full Version: (UK) Why there is there such anger over the pay offer to nurses? This is why
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https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/socie...rise-covid

INTRO: The 1 per cent pay rise offer to nurses has unleashed an extraordinary wave of opposition. Polling shows that 72 per cent of the public consider the offer inadequate, including 58 per cent of Tory voters. Moreover, 35 per cent of those polled declare themselves “angry.” This Thursday, it is likely that many of the millions who stood and applauded the NHS in the past will gather again to slow handclap this insult to NHS workers.

But why? At a time when the public finances are in such a mess, when millions will be grateful to hang on to a job at all and most are expecting no pay rise for themselves, why has such fury crystalised around a minimal pay increase for nurses? The answer is that it isn’t just about the nurses, but about our moral and political response to the pandemic as a whole.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been like a barium meal for the body politic—and what it has revealed about the innards of our society has been far from pretty. To start with, it has shown how basic public services have been hollowed out by a decade of austerity, leaving the country ill-prepared for a crisis and those dependent on such services exposed.

We have seen a decline in hospital beds (from 144,445 in 2010 to 127,255 in 2019), putting the NHS under greater stress; an increase in school class sizes to their largest in two decades, making socially distanced classrooms a practical impossibility; and the evisceration of Health and Safety infrastructure (with the number of full-time equivalent local authority inspectors down from 1,020 in 2010 to 543 in 2017), meaning that scrutiny of workplaces, bars and restaurants to ensure Covid-19 safety standards simply did not happen. Indeed, nearly 100,000 safety issues have been raised with the Health and Safety Executive during the pandemic, yet not one single company has been prosecuted for breaching Covid safety laws.

And, of course, as the welfare state atrophies, those who suffer most are the poorest, who are most likely to be infected, to be hospitalised, to enter intensive care and to die. Over time, there is a very real danger that Covid-19—like tuberculosis—will become almost entirely a disease of poverty. Vaccine take-up is heavily skewed by deprivation—in the most deprived communities, little over 20 per cent of people are vaccinated to date, whereas among the most affluent it is just shy of 40 per cent, and the broad pattern holds independent of age.

Combine that with the greater exposure of poorer populations to the virus and their worse general health and, without urgent action, we face a future in which Covid-19 is all but eliminated from large parts of the population but still persists in pockets of poverty. If you add to all this the prospect that access to venues and even work could depend on having a vaccine certificate, then the insult of social exclusion is added to the injury of disease. At worst, vaccine inequity plus vaccine passports could equal a form of poverty apartheid.

But even if this nightmare scenario is avoided, the inequalities of the pandemic are already reaching far further than the public health... (MORE)