Is the Tory government driving firefighters away in order to make a PRIVATE service more palatable?
Under-pressure firefighters outside the Grenfell Tower blaze last month [Image: PA].
Well, guess what?
Firefighters are quitting that service for the same reasons.
They say the workload is increasing but bosses – and the government – are intimidating them.
According to the Mirror report quoted below, Fire Brigades Union national officer Dave Green said, “Firefighters feel really undervalued, I speak to them all the time. When something like Grenfell or the floods happen we’re the toast of politicians – yet individually they can’t stand us, they continue to pay us pittance.”
With the police, This Writer envisaged a moment when the Conservatives would be able to claim the nationally-funded service was not fulfilling its obligations – without ever mentioning the fact that this is due to their underfunding and understaffing of it – and bring in G4S or a similar gang of profit-driven numpties to protect the very rich and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves.
Now, it seems I must repeat that comment, with regard to the fire service.
That’s how it works, according to Noam Chomsky:
It leads to the obvious question:
Who would have put out the fire in Grenfell Tower – and rescued the surviving residents – if there was no publicly-funded fire and rescue service and nobody there could afford to pay for private firefighters to attend?
Fire services face a “ticking time bomb” after the number of staff quitting to take other jobs almost doubled since the Tories took power.
Some 1,044 people resigned from Fire and Rescue Services “to take other employment” in 2015/16 – up from just 537 in 2010/11.
The toll of fire service personnel leaving for outside work has now risen for three years in a row.
And the number of fire service staff taking normal retirement is also higher than at any point in the last five years, hitting 1,415 last year.
It comes as the Tory government faces pressure to end the 1% pay cap on most public sector workers and invest in firefighting after the Grenfell Tower blaze.
Firefighters were recently offered a rise of 2% but branded it not good enough.
Fire Brigades Union national officer Dave Green blamed the “incredible” rise on pay freezes, pension changes, spiking workload and an “air of intimidation” from bosses and the government.
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical
3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
Jeezzz. yes this could be part of the Cons master plan to privatised all the public services without exception. They are already putting forward the privatisation of the NHS professional services under an agency having attacked the cost of locums and agency nursing. This is definitely something to watch closely and fight against before they run the services into oblivion so that privatisation is the only response. This for the fire service is a huge turnaround from centries ago where only houses that contibuted to a fire service could pin their lead emblem on the outside of the building showing they were covered…..for the love of god can we actually wait for this cabal of elite globalist to be chucked out before nothing is left of our country.
Privatising is the one thing they love, oh and their wealthy counterparts.
How many of their freindes are involved with private companies.
Way back in the early 1960s I remember my Uncle saying to me that, “Tories are not interested in anything from they and their wealthy chums cannot make a personal profit.” I have always remembered those words, …and how right he was.
1) Tories did not get their way with TTIP. 2) They concoct the EU Referendum and a mountain of lies to get the correct result. 3) They treat EU negotiations with utter contempt, whilst 4) Conducting “Trade Negotiations” with USA to sell our NHS, National Parks and Forests, NHS, Police, Fire and Armed Services, Land, Buildings, Industry and Commerce to USA MegaCorporation Inc.com We will not get a US-style written Constitution or Bill of Rights, just a total take-over of UK. Why? So that the Tory Party can get massive Donations, and individual Tories get massive Lobbying Fees and Career Opportunities. I said all this BEFORE the Referndum, and still find it amazing that people cannot yet see what is so obviously happening: all of the disadvantages of being American, with none of the advantages.
Liberal agenda is to transfer all public services into the private sector. Naomi Klein explained how capital deliberately creates a crisis in order to impose conditions on ordinary people that prior to the crisis would never accept. The brilliant Noam Chomsky sums up the Neo-Liberal agenda in a few words.
What still surprises me is that anyone still votes Tory, as small business people for example, have an almost impossible task to make their way due to the fact that people can’t afford to pay the prices they demand for goods and services, the credit bubble has sapped spending power beyond which most can service their debts, low wages mean low growth, and we must now be at the very bottom where stagflation is a long term problem.
So why do these people persist in cutting off their nose to spite their face?
I also feel that people like Adair Turner who understand that since the 1970s and the introduction of the Neo-Liberal agenda, tip toe around the subject using oblique language that confuse people rather than explaining the reality of what is actually happening.