To start this post off, let’s look at the valiant effort one Andrew Hickey made a few weeks before last Thursday’s UK local elections/AV referendum, to defend the LibDem’s record in government by listing all the things it has done right. I won’t fisk it line by line, but if you look at it it’s all either penny ante stuff, or things the LibDems supposedly stopped their Tory partners from doing, but of course had the Liberals not enabled them in the first place to form a government, these plans couldn’t have been made in the first place…
It doesn’t weight up to the simple fact that the LibDems made possible the government that is busy slashing the welfare state through ideologically driven budget cuts, justified by the supposed need to get rid of an “unsupportedable” government debt to restore confidence in the economy. Child benefit frozen, housing benefits capped much lower, council housing rights changed from life to fixed terms, the chucking out of disabled and chronically ill people off the disability living allowance, freezing of public sector workings and cutting public sector jobs, cuts in pensions — all far outweight the supposed benefits the LibDems brought to the coalition government.
And now…
One of the entries on Hickey’s list is “Apart from protecting the NHS from Andrew Lansley” — not quite:
An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:
* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.
* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.
* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.
* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.
* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.
* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.
The Sunday Telegraph found the details of hundreds of cuts buried in obscure appendices to lengthy policy and strategy documents published by trusts. In most cases, local communities appear to be unaware of the plans.
The Tories are still targeting the pillars of the welfare state and the LibDems enabled them to do so. Whether, as Lenny argues this is out of ideological concerns or, as I suspect, is just because the people at the top just like being in government is irrelevant. That’s why the LibDems got hammered in the local elections last Thursday, that’s why the AV vote went so disastrously wrong for the Yes camp, that’s even why the SNP won big in Scotland as the LibDem vote there switched over. Tories are Tories and nobody expected better of them, but people trusted the LibDems — no longer.