Before you say anything, I don’t hate nurses. I have nothing but admiration for the key workers who have given up their safety for us with their enduring dedication and determination despite the almost Dickensian conditions they work in.
As a student, I see first-hand how many final-year medics and nurses have traded a last few months of carefree student life to accelerate their graduation and jump straight into the deep end. I know several nurses who have struggled with gruelling 16-hour shifts, no breaks and the most harrowing scenarios imaginable.
And yet, they never falter or complain. One nurse I know had only one complaint, and that was that catching Covid-19 meant keeping her in the house and away from her patients.
The thing is, however, that I’m not just full of awe and respect for these health workers, I’m also angry. Angry on behalf of them. In short, the Government and British public aren’t doing enough to support them. Clapping is great in theory, but without any substantive action or social change to back it up, it is just working as an empty, performative gesture to try and soothe their conscience from the disgraceful way they are treating the backbone to our nation.
Firstly, there is the issue of pay. Whilst MPs in March were granted pay-rises for up to an eye-watering £81,000 per year, nurses, healthcare assistants and other low-paid healthcare staff were expected to feed their families with some blue postboxes and a felt-tip rainbow. When questioned over the issue of pay-rises for nurses, Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care responded that “now is not the time”.
But if not now, then when? Living in poverty and struggling to feed your family is difficult anytime of the year. But in the midst of a pandemic? It can mean the difference between life and death. The fact that this Government are so quick to further inflate the wages of MPs whilst simultaneously brushing off suggestions to raise the pay of nurses shows not irresponsibility, not stupidity, but callousness. They are clearly capable of making the lives of nurses financially better, but they would much prefer to look after their own.
Secondly, there is their failure to adequately test and protect NHS staff. From continuously failing in their testing targets to forcing healthcare employees to wear bin-bags as PPE, it is clear that, despite numerous questions from the public, they are completely and utterly failing in their duty to protect them. Further to this, when employees attempt to blow the whistle and ask for help, they are instead hushed up and threatened by their employers: the people who are supposed to protect then.
This jarring sense of neglect alongside the ‘hero’ rhetoric we see during these self-indulgent clap sessions work to conceal an incredibly sinister truth: The Government see these people’s lives as completely disposable. If they didn’t, why won’t they put their money where their mouth is? Is that extra £1,000 for MPs really worth the loss of our supposed ‘key’ workers?
But then, if you refuse to engage in this thoroughly performative and useless charade, you are railed at by the general public. You’re called selfish, ignorant and every name under the sun. There is nothing the Brits love more than judging people, and the weekly clapping cult has exposed the true extent that the self-righteous masses will go to in order to villainise the one person who isn’t clapping as opposed to the institution that is actively working to make these peoples’ lives worse.
“I refuse to be fooled by the NHS clap.”
The clap for the NHS may well have been sincere the first time round, but now as we approach our tenth week it has become a caricature of itself, with a self-nominated holier-than-thou NHS Neighbourhood Watch waiting in the wings to pounce if anyone isn’t clapping loud enough for their liking. Of course, these are the same people who will repeatedly break social distancing rules, which in the long run will ironically make the lives of NHS workers harder rather than easier.
I refuse to be fooled by the NHS clap. Whilst the Government and media seem determined to perpetuate this idea that the NHS is a charity (even exploiting 100-year old pensioners to achieve their goals), the fact of the matter is that it isn’t. The NHS is a publicly funded body that is being severely neglected and abused by the Government, who hope that empty gestures will pull the wool over our eyes enough that we won’t see their systematic failures.
I refuse to clap for the NHS because I refuse to accept that claps are all they deserve. We need to demand more from our Government.
Charlotte Colombo
Featured image courtesy of Guillermo Latorre via Unsplash.