Category Archives: Strike Action

Teachers, doctors and Tube workers were on strike but you had to have German TV to see it

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Did their Tory bosses order the BBC to keep coverage of the strikes off its website yesterday?

Apparently the only way to see the size and scale of the march that took place in London was via German television.

See for yourself:

Excellent journalism from German television.

But the BBC belongs on the ‘naughty step’ – again.

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How is this new offer to health unions going to do any good?

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A nurse: doesn’t this person deserve fair pay?

Apparently Health Secretary Steve Barclay is going to make a new offer to health unions, in his latest bid to end the NHS strikes in England.

But from the reports, it’s a rotten offer.

We’re hearing he’s offering a one-off payment – a bonus – of up to six per cent for 2022-23, coupled with a permanent pay increase of five per cent for the current financial year onwards.

That’s nothing like enough to cover all the money that NHS workers have lost since the Conservatives slithered back into office in 2010. Nurses have lost 20 per cent in that time.

And it won’t cover the increased costs that have been caused by inflation. You see, just because inflation goes down, that doesn’t mean prices do the same. Quite the opposite, in fact – they continue rising, just at a slower rate.

And nurses, together with all the other striking NHS workers, are struggling to make ends meet.

The impression This Writer has is that the government wants nurses to struggle and this is just another attempt to look reasonable.

Remember: MPs almost have parity with the level of pay they had in 2010 – they aren’t suffering in anything like the same way as nurses. And they get publicly-subsidised meals and drinks in the House of Commons facilities.

This Writer is glad to hear that not all of the 14 health unions are expected to support the new pay offer.

I’m aware that they may be tired of strikes, but derisory pay offers are an attack on the quality of healthcare and must be opposed.

Source: Government makes revised pay offer to health unions, reports say – UK politics live

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Has Tory Jake Berry embarked on a new career as a political irritant?

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Irritant: Jake Berry.

Former Conservative Party chairman Jake Berry seems to have embarked on a new career course – as an irritant.

Watch him in his appearance on the BBC’s Politics Live, where he came out with a series of falsehoods, overtalked other guests, and tried to start argument after argument.

I was live-tweeting at the time and tried to comment on as many of his shenanigans as possible. Feel free to comment down below on his words, my observations and anything I missed.

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Reality check (something for the weekend)

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B

The image says it all.

While the people of the UK point out that raw sewage is being pumped into our waterways, the UK has the poorest economy of all G7 countries, Brexit is a disaster, supermarket shelves are empty, people can’t pay their energy bills, the NHS is in crisis and everyone is on strike…

… all Rishi Sunak and his gang can say is, “Stop the boats.”

Pathetic. Miserable. Unacceptable.

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Strikes: will wage increases boost inflation? This may be a definitive answer

The Bank of England: don’t believe its claims about inflation.

Wage increases for striking public workers won’t increase inflation, no matter what Tory MPs say, because the government won’t add them to the cost of any products.

That’s the claim below, anyway – and it seems a good one.

The government creates money (well, orders it from the Bank of England, which then lends it to the government… it’s an over-complicated process, really) and uses taxation to keep the supply of cash within the economy at a reasonable level, thereby controlling inflation (as much as it can; the current situation is a special case, mostly caused by Brexit and foreign influences).

So it should be possible for the government to pay striking nurses (for example) as much as they want.

For commercial enterprises, matters may be different – but that’s only a possibility too:

Some have taken issue with this:

But this depends on greedy private enterprises deciding to raise their prices because they know people have more money to spend, which is poor business; taking people’s spare cash away the instant they get it means they won’t be able to support as many different parts of the economy as they would otherwise and ultimately the lot would overbalance (which is what it’s doing now, in fact).

Also, I didn’t notice prices falling when the government was stamping on everybody else’s wages.

Finally, I notice the International Monetary Fund is saying wage-price spirals are historically rare:

So what’s my verdict on the Tory claim that paying back to public sector workers the wages that have been taken away from them over the past 13 years will cause another inflation spike?

Scaremongering.

If you think junior doctors’ 26% pay demand is out of order, have a reality check

Junior doctors: this image was taken during a previous strike, in 2016. They’ve been stripped of cash over a very long time because voters kept letting the Tories back into power.

My word, Tory ministers really do spout some nonsense when they’re on the telly, don’t they?

The latest case study is one Maria Caulfield, who thinks that an 8.6 per cent pay rise, when inflation is above 10 per cent, is decent.

Remember: MPs have lost just 0.6 per cent of their already massive pay packet – in real terms – since 2010; junior doctors have lost 26 per cent – more than a quarter of their pay (in real terms) since 2008.

Almost half of them are struggling to pay their rent or mortgages while MPs like Maria have publicly-subsidised second homes.

The point about bankers’ bonuses is right on-the-nose: why do Tories think it’s so much more important to uncap those bonuses for people who provide no useful function to the population at large (but may help boost a few Tory and Tory donor bank balances) than it is to pay doctors, who save lives on a daily basis – not a fortune, but simply a living wage?

Worse still, Rishi Sunak is planning to take away junior doctors’ democratic right to withdraw their labour – strike – meaning soon he’ll be able to impose whatever starvation wages he likes. They will quit in droves and (logically) he’ll use the exodus as an excuse to say a publicly-funded health service doesn’t work – when it is in fact more true to say that a Tory government doesn’t work.

Interestingly, the Independent Pay Review Body, that the Tories love talking about when it suits them, has been supporting a better deal for junior doctors – so the Tories aren’t mentioning it. So they haven’t accepted that body’s recommendations in full. It’s another Tory lie.

Finally, a one per cent pay rise would only cost £700 million if all NHS staff were included in it. It’s a good idea to increase pay for all these people because they must be struggling too – but it’s a nonsense number to be bandying around about the junior doctors’ dispute.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic’s video, which says all of the above (and more) in a much better way than I can:

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Can an agreement be reached with nurses over pay?

A nurse: doesn’t this person deserve fair pay, after working to keep us all safe from Covid-19 for the last six months – and facing what could be a much worse period in the immediate future?

Nurses have called off their latest round of strikes in order to enter intensive negotiations with the UK’s Tory government over pay.

It seems their persistence has paid off and prime minister Rishi Sunak has u-turned on his refusal to discuss pay with them.

The issue was discussed on the BBC’s Politics Live – and, as always, a few falsehoods crept into the debate.

Here’s what was said. I’ve added a few facts where necessary – either from what I tweeted at the time, or as extra captions.

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Meeting strikers’ demands WON’T cost £1,000 per household. Sunak is LYING

Rishi Sunak (right) with his wife Akshata Murty: they live in the richest household in the United Kingdom and as such would pay more than most of us if striking public sector workers were to get the wage deal they want.

So much for his claim to be bringing integrity to the UK’s government.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the UK’s prime minister is lying to the people, but we should certainly question why anybody so economically illiterate was ever invited to be Chancellor of the Exchequer!

Rishi Sunak is actually trying to protect the richest people in the UK – those whose incomes have increased the most during the nation’s recent economic upheavals – from paying their fair share towards resolving the problems he and his colleagues have caused.

(Let’s not go too far into the argument about tax paying for anything at all. By now, everybody should know that the government creates money – or rather, orders the Bank of England to do so – and spends it into the economy; tax is a mechanism to prevent inflation by ensuring the amount of money washing around the economy is limited. That is exactly why taxes would be raised in this case.)

You see, tax is paid on a sliding scale; the lowest-earning households in the UK don’t pay any at all, while those with the highest incomes – unless they are involved in tax avoidance schemes (and many are, because Sunak insists on allowing them to continue) – pay considerably more than the average.

Sunak himself lives in the richest household in the country. You need to understand that he has a personal interest in this.

So he has sent out his spokespeople with a silly lie that he hopes that, if it is repeated enough, you will believe.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic to explain further:

Who do you believe? Sunak – or Stefanovic and me?

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NHS strikes: at last people are talking about the elephant in the room

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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GMB ambulance workers announce four new strike dates

That Tory pose of refusing to talk about pay isn’t working at all, is it?

Here’s the GMB Union:

So that’s February 6 and 20 and March 6 and 20.

And let’s remember that, however these strikes end, ambulances still won’t be arriving with callers within the government-set time limits, because the government simply doesn’t provide the resources to make this possible.

Their argument that strikes are responsible for poor response times is a lie.

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