IT IS clear just how recklessly reactionary this government really is. The liberal commentators who continue to insist that Boris Johnson is also a liberal are telling us much more about their politics than his.

Politics is always about choices and this government always chooses the option that is most damaging to ordinary people that it can get away with.

Future historians may wonder how they did manage to get away with it even for this long, and marvel at the lack of opposition they faced.

Hard on the heels of its plans to cut the uplift in universal credit, and the decision to make some of the lowest-paid workers pay more in tax to preserve the inherited wealth of the rich, the government is also pressing ahead with its Health and Social Care Bill.

It is a terrible piece of draft legislation. It will further undermine the NHS as a vital public service by forcing it down the road of the greater privatisation and outsourcing, including to huge US healthcare corporations.

The claims to be providing the necessary additional funds for the NHS are false, as these are one-off payments in an effort to cut all-time record high waiting lists.  

In any case, it is pointless providing much-needed additional funds for the NHS if a greater proportion is continually siphoned off for the profits of huge multinationals.

At the same time, in a recurring theme of this government, the Secretary of State is to be given huge powers to ram through “reforms” without any accountability. This is a deeply authoritarian government, not just in its response to legitimate dissent and protest. It also rides roughshod on the supposed checks and balance of our political system, the rights of the Opposition, scrutiny from the Lords, and the powers of the courts.

This is because they have no intention of tackling the really serious problems that affect the lives of millions. They are making them worse. Instead, it is a government by and for the profiteers, who clamp down on all criticism.

Both the NHS and social care are obviously in crisis and the Health and Social Care Bill will do nothing to alter that. Instead, they are both offered sticking plasters while the medium-term outlook is for further deterioration.

Ministers want to claim that the pandemic is responsible for the lengthening of waiting lists to all-time highs. But it is the government’s complete failure to suppress the virus which is at the root of this, and we still have one of the worst per capita death tolls in the world, while denying vaccines to others.

If we compare the current level of new cases, as well as the total hospitalised with Covid-19 and new deaths, they are all a very large multiple of where they were this time last year. This is before the flu season begins.

The NHS is already in crisis, with hospitals in a number of towns and cities around the country effectively closing even to emergency care as the Covid-related cases mount.  

The army is being called in to staff ambulances. The slogan of “protecting the NHS” is a completely empty one under the Tories. If the NHS is so stretched that in many areas it cannot provide elective surgery, or in some cases emergency care is compromised, then it is not being protected.

The NHS was already under severe strain long before the pandemic and the government’s refusal to act to suppress it. This arises from a combination of underfunding, understaffing and a retention crisis driven by both as well as chronically low pay. The government does not intend to correct any of these on a sustainable basis.

On top of this, the government’s plan to fix the crisis in social care is anything but. As many independent analysts have pointed out, people will still lose their homes and face huge bills to fund care.

At the same time, poorer people are being asked to pay more in taxes to preserve the inherited assets of the very wealthy. Crucially, there is not a single measure that government has announced of plan that will improve either the quality or availability of social care.

The vulnerable and the elderly rely on these services and the NHS cannot be fundamentally improved without addressing the social care crisis. The government is recklessly ignoring the real health and care needs of the public.

Yet at the same, it found £37 billion to waste on a shambolic test-and-trace system, the second part of that programme now having been effectively mothballed. They provided hundreds of billions to businesses in subsidies, while millions of workers have had to subsist on severely reduced pay or suffer the indignity and injustice of fire and rehire.

In just a few week’s time the furlough scheme comes to a dead stop and many economists are worried about the consequences for jobs. This is with well over a million people are still on furlough, two months after “freedom day.”

This government is not satisfied with presiding over a pandemic death toll that far exceeds the British civilian death toll in the second world war, or making hundreds of thousands of mainly low-paid workers unemployed.

The new Aukus nuclear submarine alliance threatens worse and is clearly part of a new cold war effort. This follows its previous decisions to build new aircraft carriers (which are mainly for use by US planes), to renew Trident and even to add to the existing nuclear arsenal, in breach of non-proliferation treaties.

This really is a case of guns not butter, or funding nuclear weapons not nurses pay. It is dangerous and makes us worse off.

Hedge fund managers, the friends and family of ministers, the providers of fake PPE and tracing services, the inheritors of wealth are all doing well out of this government. Everyone else is being impoverished and being put in danger.

We need to address our attention to the needs of that overwhelming majority in fighting this terrible government.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North.