Tag Archives: offer

A ‘fair and reasonable’ pay offer for nurses? You’ll get psittacosis listening to these Tory parrots!

Mark Harper: like a parrot, he’s repeated endlessly that the Tory pay cut for nurses is “fair and reasonable”. You’ll need a nurse to treat you for psittacosis after listening too much to him!

Tory ministers have been doing the media rounds, telling us how “fair and reasonable” their latest real-terms pay cut for nurses is.

Watch the clip of Mark Harper, sitting on his massive ministerial salary (that has risen at a rate within one per cent of the rate of inflation) and trying to convince Sky’s Sophie Ridge that a pay rise that’s half inflation is “decent”:

Now listen to the ever-brilliant Peter Stefanovic, telling us the facts that people like Harper don’t want us to know.

But still the Tories adhere to their “Big Lie” philosophy – tell a lie often enough and enough people will believe it.

Psittacosis, also known as parrot fever, is an infectious disease that people can contract from the tropical avians, with flu-like symptoms accompanied by a kind of pneumonia.

The most anybody can expect to get from listening to these Tory parrots is a hefty dose of that!

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Nurses to strike on May Day bank holiday after rejecting Tory pay offer

Nurses are going back on strike after rejecting a Tory pay offer that simply wasn’t enough.

Nurses from the Royal College of Nursing have rejected a government pay offer of half the rate of inflation plus a one-off payment and will strike again for 48 hours on May Day.

How appropriate for the Tory government.

The walkout will last for 48 hours from 8pm on April 30, involving NHS nurses in emergency departments, intensive care, cancer and other wards.

Some critical care services, such as intensive care, will not be staffed on strike days – something which did not happen in previous strikes.

The Tories have claimed that this is an escalation in strike action and the RCN nurses should be ashamed.

But isn’t it more shameful that the Tories could find billions to spaff on duff PPE and any number of other fraudulent offers by their buddies, but reckon they can’t afford to pay the nurses who kept us all alive during the Covid-19 crisis?

Unison nurses (and ambulance workers) have accepted the five per cent pay offer plus one-off payment of £1,655 to top-up their salaries for 2022-23.

You may also have an opinion about that.

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The UK government could have saved Dover travellers from huge queues – but didn’t

Queues: coaches waited for hours to board ferries while passengers queued for passport checks.

The UK’s Cabinet Office snubbed a £33 million proposal to double the capacity for French government passport checks at Dover – meaning it is responsible for the queues that have caused a critical incident there.

The French made the proposal back in 2020 – but the UK’s Tory government rejected it:

The money would have been used to double the number of French government passport booths from five to 10 in anticipation of more stringent requirements, including stamps in passports after January 1st, according to the Financial Times.

It came after the Port of Dover had repeatedly warned that it will need to substantially boost capacity for French controls, which under a reciprocal bilateral agreement enables passports to be checked before boarding the train or ferry to France in order to ease traffic flows.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic, in six-hour queues, made its way towards the Port of Dover on Friday – one of the busiest periods for foreign travel from the UK as most schools in England and Wales break up for summer.

When the Department for Transport was asked yesterday why it did not approve Dover’s bid for £33 million investment, an official said the department “did not comment on individual bids”.

So now we all know it’s the fault of the Tories.

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

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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Firefighters reject below-inflation pay offer and will ballot on strike action

Dept. of Below-The-Attention-Of-The-BBC: I saw this tweet from Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack…

So – nurses are to strike, civil servants are to strike, and now the fire brigades are preparing to do the same.

I clicked across to the BBC website to read the report on what this means for the Tory government in what is fast shaping up to be a Year of Discontent among working people.

Nothing.

Fortunately, other news purveyors have been quicker off the mark. Here’s the Evening Standard:

FBU general secretary Matt Wrack, said: “FBU members have spoken. This result, on a two-week turnaround, shows that there is remarkable strength of feeling amongst firefighters and control staff on this derisory pay offer.

“The ball is in the employers’ and Government’s court. There is still an opportunity to resolve this dispute and we will be writing to Fire Ministers and Government departments across the UK requesting urgent meetings.

“We have firefighters using foodbanks. Our members worked through the pandemic to help protect their communities, taking on extra duties to do so.

“A further real-terms pay cut is an absolutely disgusting way to thank them. Whilst strike action is always a last resort, our members simply can’t go on like this.”

Source: Firefighters reject 5% pay offer, paving way for ballot on strike action

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Rail strikes suspended for talks on new deal – but is anything new on offer?

Mick Lynch: he wasn’t holding back when he appeared on the BBC’s Question Time. Has anything changed?

Does Mick Lynch have a good reason to suspend rail strikes?

Here’s a quick summary of the story:

Mr Lynch, the RMT union’s general secretary, said

there had been “the promise of an offer” on pay from the rail operating companies.

However, when contacted by the BBC, rail employers and the government said their position had not changed.

If they’re not offering anything new, then there’s no reason to suspend strike action – is there?

The BBC’s report added that the suspension has been announced 11 days before a fresh RMT strike ballot is due to close on November 15.

Mr Lynch previously told the BBC that he expected workers to vote in favour, and warned that there could be strikes for another six months if no agreement is reached.

Will the new talks affect the way the ballot goes? Will they even take place before it finishes, so union members can be sure of the situation when they go to vote? Is the new offer – whatever it is – just an attempt to interfere with the result of the ballot?

Could Mr Lynch have behaved any differently?

This Writer isn’t sure he could have. But I wonder whether the future of rail services is being wagered on a form of negotiation brinkmanship.

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Keir Starmer’s offer to quit if he’s fined for breach of lockdown: overconfidence?

Keir Starmer: he has absolutely no intention of quitting as Labour Party leader – but that’s exactly what he has promised to do if the police find him to have broken lockdown rules. What if his bluff is called?

It’s a big show of bravado but it could backfire badly for the most right-wing leader Labour has ever had.

Keir Starmer has said he will stand down as Labour Party leader if the police find him guilty of breaching Covid-19 lockdown rules in April 2021.

This Site has discussed the circumstances and the various claims here and here.

Culture Minister Chris Philp has accused the Labour leader trying to “pressure the police into clearing him”, which he called “deeply inappropriate”.

But that is not Starmer’s problem.

He has painted himself into a corner.

What are voters going to do if the police don’t clear him – and he decides not to quit after all?

You can be sure that he has absolutely no intention of going, no matter what happens.

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Vaccination to be OFFERED to UK 12-15 year olds

Jabber Johnson: this overgrown teenager has had the vaccine already, despite having already been infected. It has been argued that 12-15 year olds may not benefit from vaccination because of previous infection.

Chief Medical Officers in the UK have recommended that people aged between 12 and 15 should be offered the Covid-19 vaccination.

The decision by the four CMOs comes 10 days after the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said it could not recommend adding this age group to those receiving the jabs because of a side effect of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that causes heart inflammation and may lead to palpitations and chest pain.

And children were said to be at such a low risk from the virus that vaccines would offer only a marginal benefit.

But the JCVI said ministers may want to consider wider issues like how vaccination may reduce school disruption.

Crucially, though, it seems the decision will be left to the family. This will not be an attempt to force vaccination on young people.

But if a child and parent are of opposing views and the child is considered competent to decide, the child will have the final say.

That may create a difficult situation in the future.

What else will children be considered competent to decide? On what will they be denied the choice? And how will any discrepancies be justified?

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The on-again, off-again, on-again Tory NHS pay offer that is so low it isn’t worth considering

Javid’s joke? Not satisfied with offering NHS workers – who have saved hundreds of thousands during the Covid crisis – a derisory, insulting pay award, the Tories appeared to withdraw it. Now they reckon it’s back again. Is this a mental torture technique they’re applying because they think it’s all a big giggle?

At the time of writing, the Tory three per cent NHS pay offer is back on the table.

It means that, taking inflation into account, NHS workers will have 0.6 per cent more money to play with – after 11 years of cuts that have reduced their incomes by 15 per cent at least.

The trouble is, we can’t be sure whether it’s really happening or not, because after the Tories announced they were trumping Labour’s – insulting – demand of a two per cent pay increase (which itself was a response to an initial one per cent rise by the Tories) we were faced with claims it had been trashed.

So can we believe Sajid Javid or do we ascribe his pay promise to Covid-19-spawned delusion?

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Latest DWP outrage: cold calls with ‘take it or leave it’ offer for reduced benefits

If this is true, it seems there’s no depth to which the Department for Work and Pensions won’t lower itself.

The claims is that DWP representatives are ‘cold calling’ vulnerable people who are appealing against a decision to deny them any benefits.

In the unrecorded calls, they are then offered “take it or leave it” deals paying thousands of pounds less in benefits than they may be entitled to have by law.

In some cases, it is claimed, people were told the offer would be withdrawn within minutes if they did not accept.

The aim: to settle cases before they get to tribunals where the claimant could win significantly higher payments.

The Guardian report seems to indicate that the DWP has admitted the truth of the matter, saying people accepting the offer could still go through with their appeal.

But that fact is no good if the DWP caller doesn’t actually inform the claimant of it.

It is easy to understand the attractiveness of this brutally mean-spirited practice to the penny-pinchers at the DWP.

Appeals against adverse benefit decisions are currently low in number, mostly because the Tory government has made it extremely costly, time-consuming and stressful.

But a huge 70 per cent of appeals end in victory for the claimant, making this course of action more desirable in spite of the pressure it involves.

DWP officials recently had a £1 million bonus payout for their success in depriving vulnerable people of the money that was theirs by right.

If they want to keep their cash rolling in, they have to find ways to deny it to the likes of you and I.

Source: DWP accused of offering disabled people ‘take it or leave it’ benefits | Benefits | The Guardian

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