A nurse: I’ve said this before and it still rings true – 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 across the UK will strike on December 15 and 20, after the government refused to take part in negotiations over pay and conditions.
Patricia Marquis of the Royal College of Nursing England, said Health Secretary Steve Barclay was “not willing” to talk about what needs to be discussed – pay and safe staffing.
Here’s the gist from Good Morning Britain:
This may strike you all as a naive take on the situation, but here it is:
We know that governments spend whatever they want to meet their goals every year – they create the money to do it.
We also know that taxation takes money out of the system in order to counter inflation. This can be done to correct inequalities in society, if the government of the day is minded to do so.
UK society is currently unequal on a shocking scale; millions of people are in poverty, relying on food banks (including nurses), while a relative few millionaires and billionaires are profiting hugely from the overbalanced system that Tories like Steve Barclay have created for them.
The solution is clear: tax the super-rich, then the country will be able to afford to pay nurses their due.
The added bonus of this, of course, is that the money will go to people on the bottom tier of society and will go through many pairs of hands before it is taxed back out, creating a huge boost to the economy. Money that goes to billionaires gets banked in the Cayman Islands (for example) and is no use to the economy at all.
Barclay is misleading us when he says that the country “can’t afford” to pay nurses properly. He simply doesn’t want to.
Worse still, he and his cronies – both within the government and outside – will whine that the strikes will disrupt a health service that is already at breaking point. But it was the choice of his government to push the NHS into that situation, with under-funding, privatisation and poor staffing.
Here’s the proof – a Sky News report emphasising that “patients will suffer” (watch until the focus shifts to wider strike action, around the five-minute point on the clip, which is quite long):
Possibly one good argument to use against Barclay is simply to ask how far his own pay has risen since 2010 – and how many lives he has saved during that time.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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