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When I were a lad in short trousers, Fridays were my best day of the week.
My Dad was a widow cleaner. Friday, the end of his week. He would come home and empty his leather satchel onto the kitchen table… his takings for the week.
I’d help Mum arrange the pennies and halfpennies into shillings and the shillings and two-bob bits and half-crowns into quids. The sixpences and threepences. The ten-bob and pound notes. The occasional big, white fiver.
Mum would write it all in an exercise book and then came what accountants might call the disbursements.
There were no bank accounts. We had a series of tins. Ovaltine, Oxo, National Dried Milk, Old Holborn… the bank of mum and dad.
There was a tin for everything. The rent, insurance, the tally-man (where our clothes and shoes came from), milk (delivered by the Co-op) and groceries. The Christmas tin was a shortbread biscuit tin… a relic of Christmases past.
There was a holiday tin…
… somehow or other between them Mum and Dad always managed us a week in Eastbourne. A B&B, along with Mum’s sister and her husband…
… and the emergency tin… the Cadbury’s Cocoa Tin.
We might call it the contingency reserve. Whatever was left Mum pointed to the Cocoa Tin… even just a farthing, in it went.
The importance of the Cocoa Tin?
One Sunday, when lunch was on the go, all rings and the oven blazing, the cooker flashed, sparked, smoked and conked-out. The contents of the Cocoa Tin paid the electrician fix it.
An inner tube for Dad’s bike. A black hat for Mum to go to Gran’s funeral. She borrowed the coat from a neighbour.
The sort of expenditure you couldn’t plan for but could catch you out if you didn’t prepare.
Forgive my reminiscing but, yesterday, I thought of Friday evenings as I read the first volume of the Covid Inquiry report.
If this report were a sport it would be MMA, Vale Tudo. It is brutal. It puts the boot-in… with both feet.
I link here to the quick summary. It is castigating. A nation with its trousers down. Caught out.
Unprepared. Inadequate to the point of negligent. Failure, group-think, lack of attention.
There’s plenty of of criticism to go-round but is seems to me, the problem is summed up in this couple of sentences;
‘Politicians have to make tough decisions about how to use resources to prepare for emergencies.
Preparing for a pandemic or any other emergency costs money, even if it is an event that might not happen.’
That is the real issue.
The report is clear, Covid came off the back of ten years of George Osborne’s (post banking crisis) austerity programme.
Time enough we've talked about the impact it had on the NHS and social care. Effectively, crippled both services. We continue to pay the price, today.
Not all nations did the same.
Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Sweden focussed on stimulus measures.
The consequence of our approach was (to interpret the Report), become a nation; with a struggling health service that lacked people and capacity.
A population in poor health, insufficient expenditure on contingency reserves, renewal and replenishment and inadequate time and resource spent on planning…
… and you know why.
No one in Cameron’s Government was going to put-up their hand and say let’s put-up taxes to get ready for something that might not happen.
There is an almighty lesson to learn here.
We have a new government with a narrow focus on financial prudence, a homogeneity of thinking that taxes cannot be raised and no critical evaluation of what that might mean for public services…
… particularly health that is running hot and social care that is running on money vapour.
The echo chamber of a Cabinet, anxious to deliver more of everything with promises of no more taxes.
Confirmation bias that it can be done by waiting for some purple-patch in the future when the economy will blossom.
I really hope it does but hope is not a policy.
In the meantime, if no-one will put up their hand and say, we need to raise taxes to keep our public services afloat…
... who will be brave enough to say we must tax our people more to create a reserve for something they might never experience in their lifetime.
Who will point to the Cocoa Tin.
Have the best weekend you can.
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