THE Enough is Enough campaign launched by unions, left MPs and community organisations today could hardly be more timely.
It comes as a BBC investigation exposes the crisis engulfing just one essential service — dental care — with nine in 10 NHS dental practices not accepting any new adult patients.
And amid a Conservative Party leadership contest in which neither candidate is proposing anything to address the cost-of-living crisis.
The BBC’s horrific findings shine a spotlight on one aspect of “broken Britain.” Eight in 10 NHS dental practices are not accepting children, while in a third of council areas UK-wide no dentists at all are taking on adult NHS patients.
Dental care, extremely expensive in the private sector, is becoming the preserve of the rich.
The consequences for people on ordinary incomes — which are rapidly falling in real terms — are severe: chronic pain where treatment cannot be afforded, conditions that worsen over the years, a distressing array of DIY solutions that can pose serious health risks — from people who eat nothing but soup to those who risk removing their own teeth or making their own dentures.
While it has taken the resources of the BBC to outline the picture at national level, we are indebted to the initiative of grassroots activists for exposing the dental care crisis.
The BBC would never have commissioned the study without the pioneering work of two Communist Party members from Leiston in Suffolk who noticed the closure of the two local dental surgeries in 2020-21 and, ringing round other surgeries in the county, realised that access to NHS dentistry was collapsing.
They founded the Toothless in Suffolk campaign, which later became Toothless in England as the issues it raised resonated with people elsewhere. A small online presence and a street stall had the horror stories flooding in; soon the campaign was attracting local and later national media interest.
The founders of Toothless in Suffolk can be proud that their work has led to a nationwide BBC investigation. But identifying a problem doesn’t guarantee any reaction at all from our political system.
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss’s battle for the top job seems to take place in some parallel universe.
They salivate over tax cuts when our biggest companies have increased profit margins by over 70 per cent since 2019 and while oil and gas giants boast that they have more money than they know what to do with.
They speculate over random shake-ups such as rescheduling the academic year to run from January to December as if there were no urgent issues that people are desperate to see addressed, from falling pay to yawning NHS waiting lists.
Meanwhile the official opposition is also stuck in its own world, talking about “rebooting the economy” when every reboot of Sir Keir Starmer’s own leadership only serves to jettison more commitments and leave its actual policy offer vaguer than ever.
The agenda for change must be driven from below, raised at rallies and on high streets.
Toothless in England has shown how an issue can be made to matter locally: and the BBC study shows that every MP and every council needs to be pressed on access to NHS dentistry.
On a wider scale the Enough is Enough campaign can bring the TUC’s demand for a new deal to towns and cities across Britain, raising crucial community support for the wave of strikes by workers who are standing up for pay rises they need and have earned.
Starmer’s determination that Labour should not be a “party of protest” means he turns a deaf ear to the issues exercising people up and down the country, but each strike sees more and more MPs break ranks and join picket lines.
The power of protest is real. We must shatter the complacency at Westminster and turn the tide on the profiteering few.
