We are living under a deeply cruel, ideologically driven government. Since coming to power in 2010, the Conservative’s austerity program has caused over 330,000 deaths, and the mishandling of the pandemic saw a further two hundred thousand deaths, many of them avoidable. Currently, an estimated five hundred people are dying each week because of delays in emergency care, while countless more pass away on National Health Service (NHS) waiting lists.

The human cost of the government’s mismanagement of the NHS is difficult to overstate, but it results from an intentional policy to underfund health care and allow private interests to extract money from the system.

The UK now spends about a fifth less on health care than our European neighbors — a gap of over £40 billion each year. In fact, one of the first acts of the Cameron government was to cut costs by halting the expansion of medical school training for doctors and cutting four thousand nurses’ training places. The wages of NHS workers were the next target, resulting in more than a decade of below-inflation pay rises, causing the real-terms pay of staff to plummet — nurses are paid over £5,000 a year less than they were in 2010.