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A couple of comments to add perspective to Jeremy Hunt’s Budget

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Jeremy Hunt: this image is from his financial statement last autumn but the suit is the same, apparently.

This is just to provide a little depth to the Budget coverage yesterday:

Does that give you a clearer picture? There will probably be more of this over the next few days, weeks and months.

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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.

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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Teachers vote to strike over pay and conditions – and nurses will also strike again

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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Why is the government telling an INDEPENDENT organisation what pay nurses should get?

Steve Barclay: sadly, none of the equipment behind him was able to jump-start his brain.

Remember before Christmas, when Tory spokespeople were all over the media telling us nurses couldn’t have the pay rise they were demanding because the “independent” pay review body had set the amount?

What do you make of this, then:

The Health Secretary has instructed the NHS pay review body to recommend a pay rise of around 2% for the 2023-2024 financial year.

So Steve Barclay has told the “independent” pay review body it can only recommend a tiny pay rise for nurses. That doesn’t seem independent to This Writer!

A recent letter from the secretary of state for health and social care Steve Barclay, to the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB) suggests “it is particularly important that [the NHSPRB] have regard to the government’s inflation target when forming recommendations”.

Pay awards – most particularly when the government is doing the paying – don’t cause inflation.

Mr Barclay also warns “the NHS budget has already been set until 2024 to 2025”.

So any pay negotiation – of any kind, including that supposedly offered by the Pay Review Body – must be fake, then?

Obviously, two per cent is nowhere near enough when inflation is much higher; it’s a real-terms pay cut for nurses who are already £10,000 per year worse-off, in real terms, than they were in 2008.

The result will be more nurses leaving the NHS and a further decline in the service – which Barclay will claim is because public medicine can’t work as well as private, profiteering healthcare.

People will die because of this decision – and Barclay should be held responsible.

Barclay himself seems entirely unsuited to running any kind of organisation, let alone the largest one in the United Kingdom.

After a recent visit to a hospital, he tweeted how he marvelled at a fantastic innovation in healthcare that frees up many beds.

This innovation is called a chair. It has been used in the NHS for very nearly 75 years.

Here’s A Different Bias‘s account of this weirdness:

Steve Barclay is an idiot.

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Nurse leaves picket line to save lives; ex-Sun editor calls her ‘vile sh*tbag’

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Desperate Tory attack on nurses and paramedics suggests their privatisation plan is in jeopardy

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:

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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Rees-Mogg’s attack on the NHS is ideologically-motivated piffle

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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Why will the Tories pay pharma firms 24x the usual price of their pills, but won’t give nurses a pay rise?

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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Are the media attacking striking nurses because the Tories are losing the argument?

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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