My son was born in 2010. He was born six months into a new Conservative government under David Cameron. His whole life has so far been lived under Tory rule. He knows nothing else.
When I was pregnant with him I had a good job in the NHS. I’d worked my way up from office temp into hospital management. NHS budgets were tight and I’d often bring stationery in from home, our priority was patient care, getting people seen and sorted as quickly as we could. The hospital was clean, well maintained and the staff and patients were largely very happy with how things were.
In 2013, I left the NHS due to a spinal injury and became self employed. By the time I left, the cracks were starting to show, former colleagues were leaving, waiting lists for clinics were growing, and the brilliant clinicians and nurses I worked with were starting to struggle to manage with ever tighter budgets and fewer resources.
When my son was a baby, we were encouraged to attend our local and newly built Sure Start Centre. It was a place where Health Visitors would hold weighing clinics, you could go to stay and play, get breastfeeding support and find other local mums to make friends with. By the time my son was 3, the centre had been handed over to a local charity and was no longer the parental support lifeline it once was.
As part of the round of toddler activities we went to each week, we were regulars at the library, joining in with toddler story time, reading books in the children’s section and enjoying meeting other parents and small children there. In Manchester where we live, library services have been slashed since 2010, and our local library, though still open and thriving, had to cut back on what it could offer, including toddler story times. That was a sad day.
Aged 4 my son started school, joining the nursery and subsequently got a place in Reception. It was a small church school, again run on a small budget and parents and staff did their best to raise funds for all the little extras. It was a good school, a great school, but in order to survive it joined an Academy Trust, which is what many schools have been forced into since 2010.
At school it became clear that my son had some learning disabilities, and so the school did its best for him, arranging for various assessments to be carried out and putting additional support in place for him. The SEN team did their best, but CAMHS is chronically underfunded and massively stretched, and it took 7 years to get an appointment and ultimately a diagnosis for him, which enabled him to get the appropriate support he needed. During this time the school had to find the money for his support within their own budget as without an ECHP the local authority won’t pay for any costs.
From when he was born I’ve taken my son to all the local parks, visited playgrounds, explored the wooded areas where nature thrives, chased each other through woodlands and gone pond dipping. Since 2010 local authority spending on the upkeep of our local parks has been cut to the bone. Areas have been fenced off from the public, playgrounds not maintained and then closed, tennis courts locked and left to rot. Litter piles up, anti social behaviour is rife, I can’t relax if my son, now 13 goes to the park by himself as every week a teenager gets assaulted there and one day it could be him.
Like libraries, local leisure facilities have been cut. We’ve lost swimming pools and running tracks, and sports fields have been sold to developers. Each year the sporting, leisure and learning opportunities for my son become fewer and fewer.
And I now work in Adult Social Care, and I can’t begin to tell you how being chronically underfunded, understaffed and undermined by this government is doing incredible harm to the most vulnerable adults in society. That’s an essay for another time, perhaps.
In his 13, nearly 14 years on this planet, my boy has seen an NHS brought to its knees, he’s suffered due to a 7 year wait for his learning disabilities to be diagnosed, which ultimately impacts his education. He’s watched local services, which were set up to support him and children like him be decimated. His local parks and leisure facilities have been closed or neglected and that’s before we even start to think about the impact of covid on his generation.
When he wakes up on 5th July, I hope he’s waking up to a brighter future, and a new dawn. I vividly remember the May 1997 General Election, and how energised and exciting the whole country felt. I hope he gets to experience that buzz too. As they said way back then, things can only get better, and I really hope they do.
