Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham has at last given voice to what could be the real reason the government is not talking about pay with the unions responsible for strikes in the National Health Service.
It’s a simple reason, too:
The Conservatives are planning to privatise the NHS outright.
This Site has made the point already; private health companies are more likely to snap up elements of the service if payroll costs are low.
Here’s the discussion between Ms Graham and Sky’s Sophie Ridge:
It’s good, also, to see someone making it plain that the government has been lying – about ambulance drivers endangering lives and about pay discussions.
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Teachers in England and Wales have voted by a huge majority to strike over pay and conditions.
They join many other workers – mostly in the public sector, who are striking during this Year of Discontent.
The problem is clear: the UK has a Conservative government. Tories are determined to push down pay for working people, and ensure that they work in the worst possible conditions, because it makes more profit for bosses (who are, most likely, Tory voters and donors).
Here’s a report:
And teachers give their reasons for striking here:
They’ll be on strike over seven days in February and March.
Meanwhile, nurses have voted for two more days of strike action on February 6 and 7:
It’s the same reason: Tories.
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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 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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The Conservatives are getting desperate and their attacks on the National Health Service are showing it.
They are relying increasingly on their ill-informed client journalists in the likes of the BBC and Sky News for stories alleging that people’s lives are being endangered.
So on the BBC website today (December 21) I see claims of “a baby struggling to breathe” being rushed to hospital by parents after an ambulance failed to arrive – but this happened before ambulance workers started their strike; it was a result of Tory NHS underfunding.
“Will we know if more people have died due to strikes” a BBC editorial asks, in a ridiculous bid to say striking nurses will be responsible. They won’t; the strikes have been structured to ensure that any life-threatening situation will have adequate nursing cover – or at least as much cover as may be provided by the Tory-impoverished health service.
Again, it is the government that will be to blame – not nurses.
But like the Nazis, the Tory government and its client media think that repeating a lie often enough will persuade the public to believe it.
That seems to be the reason a Sky reporter quoted Health Secretary Steve Barclay as saying ambulance drivers had made a conscious decision to put lives at risk, while interviewing GMB National Secretary Rachel Harrison.
And what happened? She dropped him right into his place in no uncertain terms:
The point about the 133,000-strong staff shortage is hugely important. The government is spending a fortune on agency workers, and they’re not enough. Higher pay and better conditions form a much better alternative.
And the GMB hasn’t even made a pay demand like that of the nurses; it simply wanted a reasonable rise now, with a promise to return to parity with 2010 levels in the future.
Public opinion remains firmly with the NHS workers:
People don't blame strikers for failure in the NHS. They blame government underfunding that leaves it short of staff. The government cannot win against this. Data from Ipsos Mori pic.twitter.com/2HeDh6nwP8
When it comes to who the public trust in the NHS dispute, the politicians (trusted by only 15%) have failed to grasp that we believe our nurses (trusted by 92%). The government have already lost the argument!#NursesStrikepic.twitter.com/RsxEMM1HYZ
The problem for the Tories is that they have an agenda: they need to undermine support for people working in the NHS to push forward their plan to privatise healthcare altogether.
That plan is now in jeopardy because they do not expect to win the next general election, in late 2024 or early 2025. A government led by any other party – even Keir Starmer’s Labour – is likely to fortify the health service, rather than undermining it further.
And if the Tories lose an election, it seems unlikely they will ever win another, judging by current demographics.
What does this mean?
I’d say it means the argument over who is responsible for the disintegration of health care in the UK is going to get a lot nastier.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg indicates what he would probably like to do to anybody supporting striking nurses.
There can be only one reason Jacob Rees-Mogg attacked the National Health Service with a clipping from The Sun – to claim it is incompetent and to undermine, by proxy, striking nurses.
There was only one problem with his argument: it was nonsense from beginning to end.
And Stella Creasy, his fellow guest on the BBC’s Politics Live, did a pretty good job of demolishing it.
For the fuller picture, listen to the commentary from Maximilien Robespierre. This Writer was away from the TV when this was transmitted (last-minute Christmas shopping), otherwise I would have had more to say about it myself.
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Pharmaceutical firms have hiked the price of medication for Strep A – the disease that is currently killing UK children – from 80p to £19 per packet.
The government is happy to pay that amount.
We know this because a government minister said so in a response to Labour Lord Prem Sikka, who wanted to know whether the government would start up its own pharma firm to manufacture this medicine for a fair price.
Here’s a commentary on what happened:
So the government is happy to pay the cost of particular medicines, even if the companies supplying them hike the price to 23.75 times its normal level – because that’s “the market price”.
Nurses are telling government ministers “the market price” of their labour should be 1.2 times its current level – and the government has refused to pay.
The latter group is looking for a fair price for an honest day’s work; the former is engaging in bare-faced profiteering.
And the Tories are supporting the profiteers. Think about it.
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There’s a big argument over the reason given by nurses for their strike, with the claim being that they are demanding far too much money.
The people making the claim are media representatives like more-than-£250,000-per-year Tory Nick Robinson who, after taking massive increases in their own pay over the last 12 years (that’s right, isn’t it, Nick?) have taken it upon themselves to berate nurses for seeking parity with what they used to receive in 2010, before 12 years of Tory pay cuts.
He has tried to claim that a so-called ‘Independent’ Pay Review Body – that was in fact set up, appointed, and is paid by the government – is offering fair pay by saying nurses should receive less than a quarter of what they would need to achieve parity with 2010.
When he lost that argument, he fell back on the “you’re saying…” fallacy, trying to tell Royal College of Nursing General Secretary Pat Cullen that she was rowing with the Tory government for “political” reasons.
Here are the reasons Robinson was wrong:
Why the media blitz on nurses? Is it because the Tory government is losing the argument?
Here’s A Different Bias to cover that angle:
So nurses are winning the argument, even among Tory voters, and despite the fact that facts themselves don’t matter as much as they way the argument is perceived.
That’s why the rail workers are having a harder time; Tory MPs keep peddling a lie that train drivers – who are well-paid – are striking for more money. But train drivers aren’t striking. They belong to a different union from the strikers – ASLEF, as opposed to the RMT union. Many RMT workers are on the minimum wage, which should indicate the depths to which the Tories have stooped.
Nurses have also performed well when interviewed:
Nurses also benefit from the government’s cack-handed handling of the consequences of their strike:
In a nutshell: soldiers assigned to cover for striking NHS staff are not trained to do the jobs they are filling, therefore they are more trouble than they are worth.
And Tory MPs are increasingly putting their feet in their mouths when they try to convince us that the cost of paying strikers is more than can be afforded:
So it seems the Tories have no choice but to rely on the media to repeat lies about nurses, time and time again, in the hope that the old Nazi strategy – of repeating a lie until people believe it – will work.
Remember those rail workers?
As I write this article, Rishi Sunak has been attacking them as “grinches” who “want to steal Christmas”.
Many of these “grinches” are on the absolute minimum wage payable in the UK, remember. Sunak is one of the richest men in the country, and is married to the richest woman in the UK. He has enjoyed above-inflation pay rises since the moment he became a member of Parliament.
So, who’s really trying to steal Christmas? Don’t expect the media to answer that honestly!
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Nurses across the UK went on strike yesterday (December 15) after the government refused to reopen pay talks, saying the demand for a 19 per cent pay rise was “unaffordable”.
Here’s a BBC report:
Is a 19 per cent pay increase unrealistic?
It would only bring nurses’ remuneration back up to the level it was at in 2010, after all. Why was it affordable then, and not now? The economy has grown since then, so where has all the money gone?
Note the claim by the Tory minister Caulfield, who said she feared nurses’ industrial action would put lives at risk. That’s clearly untrue because the BBC had already reported that nurses had agreed to go back if a life-threatening situation required them.
Here’s Labour’s Dawn Butler, who came out to support nurses on the picket lines:
Ms Butler’s comments about the way the Tories behaved during the Covid pandemic are highly pertinent. Think of all the billions they wasted on useless equipment, just to funnel money to their friends and party colleagues – and now they’re saying they can’t afford a pay rise for nurses.
Clearly, Tory priorities are wrong. They would rather enrich fraudsters than give life-savers proper remuneration.
Ms Butler’s claim about food bank use is accurate too:
Still not convinced? Let’s have an economist’s view. I’m excerpting from a longer Twitter thread, coming in at the point where he discusses pay increases:
That’s partly because the catching-up process almost never seems to be inflationary in itself, as the IMF has shown, and it’s also because unless pay does catch up inflation of the type we are now suffering can cause a recession because people can’t afford new, higher, prices.
Third, this is completely affordable. The reason is staring us in the face. Inflation does, by itself, pay for these pay rises. The simple fact is that if there is 10% price inflation and 10% wage inflation then the revenues from the three big taxes go up by at least 10% as well.
Now of course I know there are other cost increases to consider as well. But the big one is interest – and cutting interest rates, which the government could do, could solve that and save more than £30 billion a year at the same time.
What is impossible is that they can claim what they are doing is credible economic policy when it is not. Refusing to pay affordable inflation-matching pay rises when doing so would prevent recession makes no sense at all. So the other options have to be taken seriously.
If we had an honest, fair, open and competent government in this country they would be offering inflation-matching pay rises to their staff now. Instead we have a government intent on crushing the public services and the people who work for them.
Their battle is ours too if we want to live in a decent, prosperous society where all have a chance. The government does not want that. But we can and should have it. That’s enough to require support for the nurses and others pursuing their claims. Right is on their side.
The strikes are not a result of greed by trade unionists.
They are part of a class war being waged on working people – on you – by your Conservative government.
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Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has tried to claim it is reasonable to give nurses a pay cut – any pay rise that doesn’t equal inflation is a cut – by claiming it is in line with an independent review.
His argument might seem reasonable to people who don’t realise that his government is still funnelling money to the extremely rich people in (for example) the financial sector, for no reason.
I thought it might be useful to contrast his words with what might be the thoughts of a great British … character – in order to put them into context.
Enjoy.
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