While Keir Starmer talks a lot of nonsense about the NHS – particularly failures by ambulance crews to reach people in time – Jeremy Corbyn highlights the reasons such people are going on strike.

Today (Monday, May 22, 2023), the Tory government’s anti-strike Bill returns to Parliament, with its requirement that industries including the health service, rail, education, fire, and border security provide ‘minimum service levels’.

Mr Corbyn makes what should be the obvious point: people in these industries are striking because their bosses won’t allow them to meet these minimum levels:

Doctors and nurses are striking because patients are dying.

Teachers are striking because children are suffering.

Postal workers are striking because Royal Mail is failing.

If the Tories cared about “minimum service levels”, they would support workers’ demands for fully-funded and fully-staffed public services.

Instead, by overriding the fundamental right to strike, they are preventing people from fighting for the safety of us all.

That’s Mr Corbyn’s main message, but there is another: this attack on strikers is supported by corporate greed.

“In scapegoating NHS staff, teachers, railway workers, posties and civil servants, the government is forcing ordinary people to pay the price for a crisis caused by decades of austerity, economic mismanagement, and corporate greed,” he writes.

“This price is paid through real-terms cuts to their wages. It’s paid through the stress and anxiety of an increased workload. And it’s paid through public bailouts of failing private companies that continue to destroy the services upon which we all rely.”

Put simply: the attack on strikers is an attack on workers’ pay and the quality of the services they provide, purely to make more profit for bosses and shareholders who don’t use those services and don’t care.

Source: Jeremy Corbyn – When our democracy is under attack, it’s up to the labour movement to fight back

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