I’m tempted to visit our local hospital, Southmead, today to give my best wishes and all my support to our nurses who are on strike today. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is the least militant trade union in the land. Indeed, how could it possibly not be, given that its members are nurses, the finest people in the land, along with the doctors who they work with. We’re not talking about far left firebrands like Len McCluskey or Mark Serwotka, whose political ambitions go way beyond improving the terms their members, but actual nurses. They are on strike because many of them do not have enough money to live on and because our underfunded NHS is falling apart at the seams. That’s just for starters. The nurses have to win this campaign and they will.
At PMQs yesterday, Labour leader Keir Starmer told Rishi Sunak that the very fact nurses were on strike was a badge of shame on this government. Nurses, he added, would call off the strikes if only he would meet the RCN. Why wouldn’t he do so? Starmer explained that the mother of a boy called Alex was watching PMQs because the operation to have his gall bladder removed had been cancelled. Could the PM say something to her? Of course he could. Here, and I paraphrase, is what he said:
“Look, there are loads of people in Alex’s position. There’s fuck all I can do about it because of Covid and if the leader of the opposition had had his way, we’d still be in lockdown. And anyway: this is all because Labour is in hock to union barons. Nurses are bringing the country to its knees. Get back to work you ungrateful bastards.”
Well, that’s what it sounded like to me, anyway. Rishi Sunak, the richest man in politics and actually one of the richest people in the land, having a pop at actual nurses. And of course he didn’t answer the question of whether he would meet the RCN. Well, why should he? He probably would recognise an NHS nurse if one pissed down his leg, judging from his preference to use the parasites of private health care instead of his local NHS surgery.
Even the howling mad, rabid right-wing Daily Express has a front page headline today which, for once, is in keeping with the mood of the public: “Give nurses a deal and stop this madness.” If the Mail had run a headline welcoming desperate refugees or The Sun had called for state ownership of the railways, I would not have been any more staggered. The game, Mr Sunak, is up. He can’t go on attacking these awful union barons for trying to improve the wages and conditions of low paid workers because low paid workers live among us. And if he thinks the public mood will soon turn against nurses, I strongly urge him to think again. Because it won’t.
Loads of workers are on strike at the moment, including those in my old union PCS, although the aforementioned Serwotka is paying striking members their full pay so they lose nothing by going on strike, subsidised by a compulsory level on members who aren’t on strike, without even bothering to first ask them about it. Still, if that’s the only way to fight back for low paid workers – and trust me, many of my old colleagues are low paid, using food banks and claiming the very benefits they pay out to claimants – then so be it.
Things must be desperate if our nurses have to go on strike. During Covid, Chancellor Sunak was standing outside 11 Downing Street joining in the weekly round of applause for our key workers but now he treats them as the enemy. It was all an act by a man with more money than he will ever be able to spend who literally doesn’t care if nurses are forced to use food banks and claim in work benefits. What a state we are in. Nurses, like many other vital frontline workers, are lions led by donkeys. Sunak’s silky smooth spin is fooling no one and he seems to be the only one who hasn’t realised.
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