Dear Yorkshire Tory MPs,
Christmas season wishes to yourselves and your teams – may 2023 prove a year of improved integrity within the government and its actions. We wish you to understand how you come across with your failures to act in the ‘common good’ trustworthily. We no longer wish to see this type of behaviour and mixed messages.
Speaking on Sky News today, 15 December 2022, health minister Maria Caulfield said that borrowing could not be used for spending on a larger pay award for nurses due to the failures of Liz Truss’s mini budget. She said: “We could’ve ignored the pay review bodies’ recommendation and gone for a much lower pay rise – we could go higher, but we have got to find that money from somewhere. This isn’t government money, it’s taxpayers’ money.”
Corruption and misuse of public money
It is a struggle to hear this from a Tory minister given the ongoing VIP corruption and misuse of public monies by key Conservative Party MPs and peers. Revelations of Lady Mone’s actions and potential misuse of monies for personal gain continue the story of Tory party corruption for the last decade or more, worse in the last five years.
During Covid, we as a family offered our range of public service skills free, throughout the pandemic, for the common good; not ‘Mone-for-me’ type good. In fact, in April 2020 I wrote to Julian Smith MP about my brother CJ offering to help with the ventilator shortage, using his world-class engineering skills. He was offering this for free. Mr Smith suggested CJ write to the health secretary, Matt Hancock, which he did. No reply was ever received, and we now we know why, as Hancock’s focus was on the ‘VIP lane’ approach.
And along with many, many other volunteers up and down the country, I worked free in both vaccination centres, as did my partner on the NHS Covid response line. Not one of us took a penny; we did this for the common good, to help the NHS and public services. Some of our colleagues died of Covid, some colleagues remain quite unwell with long Covid and have lost their health and are no longer able to contribute.
This is about fairness. Nursing and medical colleagues especially were drafted in to an unknown pandemic with insufficient protection and got on with it. They deserve our respect and our thanks, and they deserve fair pay. In contrast, those who took public money and failed to deliver, and who made decisions that took away the lives of people, patients or staff in public services, should be treated as having committed crimes against humanity.
Support for strikers
Today I will be on the strike lines with the nurses and ambulance workers, because the government stole from the public and gave to the rich who fail to pay their share of tax. The will be the first time in my 45 years of work in the NHS that I’ve done this. The NHS was created because people at the end of the second world war voted democratically for a government that would deliver universal health care. The people in the second world war gave their lives for the better outcomes describe in the Beveridge Report. The report was even shared with the troops fighting on the battlefields of Asia by their commanders.
The Conservative Party is as rotten as it was in 1830, when it bribed people for votes to get Tory MPs elected prior to the Great Reform Act 1832. Where is your integrity, trust and even common sense? Time to reform yourselves.
With kind regards,
Dr Frances Cole
