Counting the Pennies

Five years ago, if George Osborne had said we couldn’t afford to give the nurses more than 1%, there would have been a kind of logic to it. He was mean and vindictive to a wide range of people, so it wasn’t a surprise. But this outfit, with their track record? And within a week, they announce that they’re raising the cap on our stockpile of Trident nuclear warheads. They don’t actually put a price on it, but we can assume that it’s a lot. Why more warheads now? Apparently, it will help to counter cyber threats, although I’ve yet to hear of any cyber threat being prevented because a politician threatened to dispatch a nuclear warhead. And if you asked a hundred people in the UK at random, looking back over the last twelve months, to decide expenditure priorities between “nurses” and “warheads”, I think I know what the answer would be.

We can only guess at the cost of the warheads. But we know the cost of test and trace. According to the public accounts committee, £22 billion of our money went on a scheme where “there is no evidence that it contributed to the fall in infections”. So if the brains responsible for that decision are telling us we can’t afford more money for the nurses, that maybe needs to be taken with a generous pinch of salt.