It would be funny if it were not so tragic.

The Conservative government is not happy because there is a labour shortage in the UK.

The last figures This Writer has seen suggest that businesses need an extra million workers.

It would be easy to blame Brexit for the shortfall, and there is certainly an argument that sending migrant workers back to their own countries has been a bad idea.

But there’s also the fact – fact, mark you – that the Conservative governments of 2010 onwards have been killing off working-age people at an astonishing rate. This is not a reference to Covid, but to actual, premeditated Tory policy.

The ever-excellent Prem Sikka made this point in a House of Lords debate on the subject:

He had previously posted this on ‘X’:

The article to which he links provides all the information you need:

People in secure and well paid jobs are more likely to have a longer life expectancy and take less time off work due to sickness. This can swell the size of the work force, but the government has pushed real wage cuts with claims that wage increases for workers are inflationary though that logic is suspended for executives and bankers. The average real wage has remained mostly unchanged since 2007.

The annual UK median wage is around £29,669.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that a single person needs to earn £29,500 a year to reach a minimum acceptable standard of living. A couple with two children need to earn £50,000 between them. This means that nearly half the working population does not reach the minimum standard of living though low incomes can be supplemented by means-tested social security systems. 17.8m adults have income of less than £12,570. Indeed, due to low pay more people in work are claiming social security benefits than those out of work.

The result is that some 14.4 million people live in poverty. Millions of people are deprived of good food, housing, education, clothing, skills and healthcare. Deprived people cannot work long hours or fulfil their potential. More workers report sick and have mental and physical health problems. More than 800,000 patients were admitted to hospital with malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies last year. Some 16m people have disabilities which may affect their participation in labour markets. The government is considering withdrawing benefits from the old, sick and disabled and force them to work, but it is hard to see how that will deal with systemic problems.

Rather than improving healthcare, the government has reduced access to healthcare. People struggle to get access to NHS dentists and family doctors. Some 6.39 million individuals in England alone are waiting for 7.6m hospital appointments. That is one-in-nine persons. Around 2.8 million people, roughly equivalent to the populations of Bournemouth, Cardiff, Coventry, Edinburgh Stoke-on-Trent and Middlesbrough, combined, are suffering from chronic health conditions and are unable to work. More than 500,000 under-35s in the prime of their life are out of work due to long-term illness.

A 2023 study reported in the 5 years to 2022 nearly 1.5 million people in England died whilst waiting for a NHS hospital appointment – that is nearly 300,000 a year.  A 2022 study reported that between 2012 and 2019, government imposed austerity caused 335,000 excess deaths in England and Scotland i.e. nearly 48,000 a year. One-third of these deaths were among people under 65. Another study estimated that between 2011 and 2020, 1.2m people in England died prematurely from a combination of poverty, austerity and Covid. The Government’s obsession with austerity, wage cuts and defunct economic theories has turned the state into a killing machine, and is a major cause of labour shortages.

The article is well worth reading as it covers other reasons for the labour shortage – all of which are down to government policy, inactivity or incompetence.

This Site has been warning that government policy kills since it was founded in 2011 – but at successive elections, the Tories have been voted back in.

So the logical conclusion is that the people of the UK are happy to be deprived of the healthcare to which we all contribute via our taxes, happy to be starved of food, housing and education, and happy to be driven into mental illness by the stress that all this causes.

Are we?

Or have we all been misled, time and again, by politicians with undeclared interests in keeping us down, along with their client media?

With a general election coming up soon, isn’t it time we gave up listening to the public relations people and started to check for ourselves what we are really being offered?

The people of Rochdale could use their by-election as an example for the rest of us.

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