A letter a day to number 10. No 1,418
Saturday 30 April 2016.
Dear Mr Cameron,
Just in case you were wondering, junior doctors have not gone away, Jeremy Hunt is not off the hook and the support for junior doctors will continue. The contract that Hunt wants to impose on them is not safe and will put lives at risk.
But let’s shimmy aside from junior doctors here and consider our fire services which have been subject to crippling cuts leading to stations being closed, equipment sold off and huge staffing cuts. The latest report says that fire deaths have seen the biggest increase for a decade and yet the fire service faces up to 50% further cuts by 2020, following 30% cuts under your coalition government. Cuts imposed by your government cost lives and that will only get worse.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard or read people say, “It’s as if the government doesn’t care about our lives,” to which I respond, “There’s no ‘as if’ about it, the government doesn’t care about our lives.”
Yours is the government that deprives people of the means of survival for up to three years, has ignored the massive rise in food banks and yet gives tax cuts to the wealthy and reduces corporation tax.
How many lives would have been put at risk if you’d hiked corporation tax as a response to industrial scale tax avoidance and tax evasion thus imposing an industry wide corporate responsibility to address tax dodging? How many people would starve to death if a City Tax was imposed on the City of London, home to those who get fat on selling Olympic sized tax dodging deals?
Every single person and every single business that sets about dodging tax is putting up two fingers to the nation which sustains and supports them through the massive infrastructure that taxation pays for. Whether it’s junior doctors, fire services, low paid workers or disabled people, all pay the price for greed.
Greed costs lives, it’s not an impact free choice, the consequences are measured in human suffering and deaths. Osborne expects those without wealth to pay down the debt caused by those who enjoy obscene wealth and who continue to enjoy fat city bonuses. You claim we are all in this together, were that true then we might get a fully 7 day NHS which includes elective care, we would not see a 21% increase in fire deaths, we would not see the biggest increase in England’s death rate since WWII caused by the imposition of your ideological austerity. Austerity is a war imposed on those who can least afford it by those who are unaffected or gain from it.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/26/fire-deaths-rise-by-21-as-chiefs-issue-cuts-warning
https://www.fbu.org.uk/save-our-fire-and-rescue-service
https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/
http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/02/london-corporation-city
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
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