Hardworking demonstrators

Report from Manchester by Natasha Steel

Approaching the conference centre

The award for irony of the day must go to the Conservative Party. As a trade union march of 50,000 people whistled and booed their way past the heavily policed and fortified Manchester Central Conference Centre on Sunday, the Tory banners proclaimed their allegiance with “hardworking people”.

Strangely, a care worker from Chester I met who works fourteen hour shifts “wiping arses” and was on the demonstration was unswayed by the signage and showed no inclination for joining the party. 

“Half of the month I sleep over,” she said. “I don’t like it, having to get into a bed that someone else sleeps in, but you have to do it if you want to pay the mortgage. If there’s overtime I always say yes.

“It’s the only way we can make ends meet. 

“But you don’t actually get much sleep, there’s always someone up and you have to be up with them. I’ve done this for 25 years, what I really want to do is be an NHS nurse, but there’s no way I can afford to retrain and pay the mortgage. I just can’t take the risk.”

She recounted how her boss in the privately run company had told her that pay was low because ‘anyone can do care work.’

“Can you?” she’d asked. “Can you wipe shitty arses when it’s all up their back and on the walls? Can you do that?”

Unsurprisingly, he retracted.

She also described how work was made harder because the hoists that got boxes ticked on the inspectors’ rounds weren’t actually used because there wasn’t the time. “We just have to lift them in the old way,” she said.

 
Similar stories of overwork, low pay and worsening conditions could probably be told by many of the hardworking demonstrators on the march – over three times as many as were attending the party conference. However, according to the BBC’s chief political correspondent, Norman Smith, the Tories weren’t actually very interested in hearing from them after all.

“I was stopped from filming 'Live' for @BBCNews Channel from conf centre overlooking #nhs299 demo” he tweeted. 

Doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, care workers, bakery workers, teachers, firefighters, journalists – the range of professions was vast, but the experiences were common. Not only do most people already work exceptionally hard, but pay is poor and housing expensive. Where regulation is weak, they are hit again. 

I think it’s safe to say – without irony - that on Sunday the hardworking people of Britain were on the streets of Manchester, not in the Conservative Party Conference.

Natasha Steel