The frame game: how Grant Shapps LIED about the need for new anti-strike law
Business secretary Grant Shapps explained the need for a new law demanding “minimum service levels” during strikes – with a pack of lies.
The trick was in the way he framed the situation.
He claimed that the aim was to protect lives and livelihoods – that the right for nurses and ambulance workers (for example) to strike should not come at the expense of the lives of people across the UK.
And he said the wave of strikes sweeping the UK had been caused by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and by the Covid-19 crisis that created huge backlogs in NHS healthcare procedures.
See for yourself:
In fact, as Labour’s Angela Rayner pointed out, the strikes were caused by the government’s own policy of running the NHS (to use the same example) into the ground, starving it of resources and forcing employees to seek alternative jobs, simply to make ends meet.
She said people had been dying while waiting for ambulances long before ambulance workers took the decision to go on strike – because of delays caused by Tory defunding and de-resourcing.
In fact, ambulance workers had continued to work, coming off the picket lines in order to respond to emergency calls. Shapps’s legislation was jeopardising that.
Excess deaths were at their highest level since the Covid crisis, she said – because of staffing shortages caused by the Tory government.
Livelihoods and lives were already being lost, she said. Everybody wanted minimum service standards – but it was the government’s job to provide it (implying that the government had deliberately chosen not to).
Again, see for yourself:
Rayner was correct; Shapps had been telling untruths.
This Site has been reporting on failures in ambulance responses for years – since long before the Covid crisis or the invasion of Ukraine. Likewise with the shortage of nursing staff due to low pay.
Take a look at some of the articles from previous years – firstly on nursing:
‘The man who cut the NHS, not the deficit’
‘Compassion bypass’ as Coalition puts the squeeze on benefits and wages
Greatest Coalition Failures: National Health Service
Squirm, Cameron – we want answers about the NHS!
May surfaces to deny existence of NHS crisis. Total winter deaths are up by 50,000
Tory voters: Here is your government’s National Health Service – in graphs
Hunt trolls NHS staff by praising rota showing dangerous staff shortages
NHS vacancies are a national emergency BECAUSE THE TORIES MADE IT ONE
London hospital drops chemotherapy due to Tory-caused nursing shortage
Then on ambulance cover:
‘The man who cut the NHS, not the deficit’
Government accused of trying to ‘cover up’ scale of looming NHS winter crisis
NHS England records worst ever performance figures under Tory mismanagement
#NHSCrisis: Keep reminding May the misery is her fault
Tory-engineered NHS crisis is causing unnecessary deaths – and Theresa May boasts
NHS privatisation: paying profiteers means there’s no money for healthcare and patients are harmed
Point made?
The Tories have been demolishing public sector pay since they came into government in 2010. They know a low wage bill is appetising to private firms when public services are privatised. And that’s the end goal of Tory policy – certainly on the NHS.
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What do we expect from the photoshopping millionaire fraudster Michael Green?
This tory criminal Cartel are determined to destroy Britain, and determined to make the British people suffer as much as possible before the tory criminal cartel are booted out of office.It is just a pity that thetories have proved that they are above the law…otherwise they would all be in prison now!