100 years After The 1916 Uprising, Is Britain On The Brink Of Civil Unrest?

To assuage my guilt I rationalised that the DVD I sat my child in front of was educational. Admittedly, Box Trolls does not elucidate the latest curriculum but that’s because it seeks to reduce schools to fact factories where fanciful, or god forbid, critical thinking, is stridently discouraged. Mr Grandgrind of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, would be immensely gratified.

Nevertheless, Box Trolls gave me a 90 minute window to pull together a body of clinical evidence to present to my local hospital board. They were poised to vote on the principle of closing our much needed A&E, which already takes over an hour to get to in the back of an ambulance – yes, I’m talking about the UK, not Malawi.

The evidence was compelling but when has patient safety ever gotten in the way of axing services and systematically dismantling the NHS? Why waste my time going to a meeting in the vain hope of influencing a decision that had already been made, when I could/should be spending time with my child during half term?

When the film was over I asked, “So, what was the moral of the story?”. Without missing a beat my 8 year old said, “There are two morals mummy. Firstly, always fight evil wherever you see it. It’s no good ignoring it, it won’t go away, and secondly, even bad people can become good if they make the right choices”. My doubts dissolved and hardened into a steely resolve. If we want to protect the NHS for future generations, we must be prepared to fight for it.

Sitting in the oppressive board room, powerless to speak unless permission is granted, disenfranchised by democracy, reduced now to a redundant concept invoked only by “militants” and “dreamers”. I watched helplessly from the side-lines, impotent in all but symbolic gestures with no real mechanism to be heard.

As the cost of the future of our A&E was presented purely in fiscal terms, with no consideration whatsoever given to the cost to lives, the words of James Connolly, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter rising came to mind. “Yes, friends, government in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”

And I recognised the similarities between, what has become my reality under a totalitarian Tory regime, and that of my ancestor’s under British rule. All of my spare time is invested in various campaigns to defend hard won public services, civil liberties and human rights. We’re under constant siege with sniper fire coming from all directions.

As a parent who knows what it’s like for their seriously injured child to have to travel great distances in an ambulance to get to A&E, the madness of suggesting that journey increases, is a battle I cannot surrender to. As a parent who believes in schools being accountable to parents and communities and not owned by academy chains who are not accountable to anyone but their shareholders and for whom profit, not child well-being, is their primary motive, I have no choice but to fight imposed academisation.

Our schools are now on the brink of being removed from local accountability to voters, parents, students or staff. They are to be signed over to private companies and directors who will not be required to have any connection whatsoever to our schools or our communities.

In the same way that splitting the NHS into individual Trusts makes it easier to pick them off one by one, the imposed conversion of schools into academy Trusts will achieve the same goal- privatisation. It’s so much easier to do under the radar if they’re all fragmented into separate local entities

This in turn makes our public services easy picking for US healthcare giants and “edu-businesses” to swoop in if TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) ever gets past the European Commission. Under TTIP, future governments would be unable to preserve education as a public service.

The investment protector clause (ISDS), allows corporations to sue governments. In the UK, critics are concerned that US healthcare companies now running parts of the NHS might use ISDS tribunals to sue future British governments wanting to reverse privatisation of parts of the health service. Cigarette maker Phillip Morris used ISDS to sue Australia and Uruguay for implementing plain cigarette packaging. Governments’ duty to promote public health is subjugated to corporate profit.

Writing in today’s Conservative Home, Peter Lilley MP raises the red flag on TTIP saying, US companies could sue the UK government should it want to take back into the public sector privately provided services in the NHS, education, and so forth – or open fewer services to private provision.

Then there’s the attack on our libraries and leisure centres. Too many battles and so little time and energy to fight them all. Which is all part of the grand plan. Overwhelm us, divide us, demoralise us. This is how this government, acting as an agent for the insatiable, greed crazed capitalist machine, plans to break us.

George Osborne, who James Connolly would no doubt describe as the capitalist committee’s finance director, didn’t disguise his motives in the recent budget. His plans to sell the Government’s 73 % in Royal Bank of Scotland at a loss of £22m was described by critics as “reckless and short-termist”. Christine Berry, a senior researcher at the New Economics Foundation, accused Osborne of relying on the sale of public assets to plug holes in the budget coupled with an “ideological obsession” with private ownership. While hedge fund managers stand to profit at our expense, George Osborne announced that cuts to disability benefits would raise £4.4 billion.

The same conditions that precipitated the Dublin rebellion 100 years ago are present today. A disenfranchised, disillusioned, dispossessed people, have had enough. Enough of the transference of wealth to absentee landlords, enough of rack rents, starvation and poverty, enough of inequality and injustice. In the absence of fairness, justice and democracy, an uprising is surely inevitable.