Bare-faced: how Steve Barclay has the nerve to spit out falsehoods about valuing nurses and giving them a pay rise must be beyond the understanding of anybody with a brain.

There can’t be many spectacles as ugly as that of a Tory minister crowing about giving a pay cut to nurses who kept us all alive during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Here’s Steve Barclay:

In fact, while Barclay enjoys real-terms pay parity with what MPs had back in 2010 plus his very large ministerial pay packet, many nurses have suffered a real-terms pay cut of 20 per cent during the same period, meaning they already effectively work one day a week for free.

On top of that, he’s now giving them a pay increase that is only just over half the current rate of inflation – meaning it is a pay cut.

This Site explained what Barclay and the Tories were doing, back in April. Read it here.

It seems that members of the Royal College of Nursing simply lost their ability to continue striking for better pay. Remember, they have been working one day a week for free, and that has to have an impact on their ability to resist further attacks on their pay; they don’t have the savings to support strike action. Many of them were already forced to visit food banks before the strikes even began.

Barclay’s claim to “hugely value” nurses’ work can be interpreted as nothing more than a bare-faced lie.

If he valued them, he would be offering them at least the same pay deal he gets – parity with the past. If he really valued them, he would offer more (because – remember – MPs receive significantly better pay than nurses).

Did he applaud them like a filthy hypocrite on Thursday nights during pandemic lockdown in 2020?

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