SATURDAY, July 3, 2021 marks the 73rd birthday of the National Health Service.

It’s old enough to have helped raise several grandparents, and while the part-privatisation of it by Serco, etc, is one of the dangers facing it — especially as Baroness Dido Harding of Serco aims to be the next head of the NHS — NHS staff pay and conditions coupled with nurses’ debt also threaten its 'cradle to the grave' longevity for future generations.

Addressing the accession of Margaret Thatcher to leadership of the Tory Party in 1975, Harvey Andrews & Graham Cooper wrote a song called ‘Targets’, containing the words: “My girl she nurses sick and old. The builders of the nation. And then they pay a pauper’s wage. And tell her it’s ‘vocation’…."

And chorus critiquing Thatcher’s ‘pursuit of inequality’: “Call us equal? Call us proud? Call yourself a liar. No matter what the people do. They set the targets higher.”

Those were comparatively ‘good old days’.

In 2020, responding to Hereford Times’ campaign for scrapping fees for student nurses fighting coronavirus, Hereford & South Herefordshire MP and old Etonian Jesse Norman said: “These students will be paid for their work.

"They will also continue to receive payments through the Learning Support Fund and the Student Loans Company.”

Yet Platform magazine has reported that nursing graduates leave university with nearly £60,000 of student debt, and Nursing Times cites a survey stating that nurses are increasingly considering quitting the profession.

Now, while the NHS pay rise is a mere 1 pere cent, ‘financial services firm’ Legal & General (L&G) is a funder of the Conservative Party.

I wonder therefore, can we expect a scene in L&G’s televised Equity Release adverts saying: “My grandchild’s student nurse training? My home will help pay for it?”

Maybe not, but I believe the cost for nurses of graduating must be brought home to those who unquestioningly vote Conservative and retired people in general.

And so I shall be helping to staff a stall in Hereford’s High Town on Saturday, July 3, 11am till 2pm, promoting the goal of a 15 per cent pay rise for NHS staff and ending privatisation of its vital services.

Alan Wheatley
Belmont
Hereford