"WE'RE all in this together." If I hear this once more I’ll scream because the truth is we aren’t. The poor are 'in it' to a much greater degree than those fortunate enough to live in detached homes, with big gardens, beside country parks... in other words, people like me.
We're all in this together. Tell that to a single mother with three children living in a 10th-floor flat in Fianna House on the New Lodge; to do so would be patronising in the extreme. And I speak from experience as I lived with my parents and three brothers on the 10th floor of the same block of flats in the 1970s, when it was called Dill House.
Yet despite having lived there myself, I can only imagine the difficulties such a mother must face trying to juggle educating, entertaining and nurturing her children in such a confined space, made all the smaller by this lockdown.
While I understand the motivation behind banal slogans such as ‘we’re all in this together’, the time for a British stiff upper lip is over. We need to recognise this jingoistic slogan as a convenient political tool to paint any valid criticism as defeatist, or as working against the common good.
While some during this pandemic remain content to whistle a happy tune, I believe it is essential that politicians are held accountable for their actions, or indeed inaction. This is exactly what Keir Starmer did in his first Prime Minister’s Questions as leader of the Labour Party, highlighting a clear pattern in the government’s approach to the pandemic, accusing it of being slow. Slow into lockdown. Slow on testing. Slow on PPE.
Worse than slow, the decision of the UK government to reject what was, under the circumstances, a very gracious invitation to join an EU procurement scheme to buy PPE, epitomises the pro-Brexit madness of the Tory party. And having closed down that source, the government is further accused of ignoring offers by British PPE producers to plug the gap in the supply of the much-needed protective equipment.
We’re all in this together. Yeah, right. Tell that to the small businessman who’s spent the last month unable to access government bank loans because the banks have made doing so a bureaucratic nightmare. The very same banks whose overdraft charges increase this July to 40 per cent yet who pay a paltry 0.1 per cent to depositors. The same banks who UK taxpayers bailed out at a cost of billions after their greed and mismanagement left them on the point of bankruptcy in 2008.
We’re all in this together. Tell that to the thousands of holidaymakers with holidays cancelled due to coronavirus who find they cannot get a full refund because some major travel companies and airlines are refusing to give them, even though in doing so they break the law.
We’re all in this together. Tell that to the thousands of small businesses who will go to the wall yet watch as billionaires such as Richard Branson demand, and probably get, government bailouts. And let’s not forget that while many in the NHS work for a pittance, many companies profiteer from the crisis.
Worst of all would be to draw a false equivalence between the general public and the thousands of carers who every day put their lives in danger, working with the sick and vulnerable in sub-standard PPE. Invariably we only learn their names when tragically they join the list of Covid-19 fatalities.
Yet each of their stories is remarkable, and I can tell you one. We have a family friend called Cara Parker; she is a wife and mother who happens to manage a nursing home in north Belfast. Two weeks ago she left for work as normal, but that’s when normality for her ended. After an outbreak of coronavirus where she works, she’s been unable to return home, nor does she know when she will return. Her husband, Richard, is left to care for their three children, all under the age of 12, while she stays away to protect them.
This is but one of a thousand such stories of carers who make our minor inconveniences pale into insignificance. So, I say it again, we aren’t ‘all in this together’. Most of us are fortunate to be mere spectators compared to the few who will not only sacrifice their family life, but some their very lives. So don’t add to their burden. Stay home, stay safe, protect our NHS.
