Phillip James describes the many people involved in strikes at present as ‘left wing’ – evidently an automatic condemnation for him.
I have a feeling that it’s not only left-wingers that are involved, and even some Conservative MPs have been critical of the government’s lack of engagement with the nurses.
Up to the early 1980s, governments of both persuasions found that an annual increment in NHS funding of about five per cent, was appropriate to cover the decline of the pound, the increase in population, and the need to update hospitals and equipment as necessary
.That gave us a good NHS by world standards. Mrs Thatcher instituted the underfunding of the NHS by reducing the annual increment to three per cent.
By the end of her time, there was already a notable fall in the number of hospital beds. The reduced rate and its effects continued with John Major.
The Blair and Brown Labour governments raised the annual increment to six per cent to try to recover some lost ground.
It could only be partly successful, but amongst other things it gave Spalding its new Johnson Hospital.
However, the follow-on Coalition government (Conservative and Lib-Dem), took the annual increment right down to one per cent, and successive Conservative governments kept it only marginally above that level.
Result: At the time just before the COVID outbreak, there was a shortage of around 100,000 staff, and bed numbers had become the lowest per 100,000 of the population amongst all the comparable European countries. And nurses (and other medical staff) had seen the real value of their pay substantially decline.
Conservative governments have, for the last 40 years, and eyes open, pursued the running-down of the NHS and the under-payment of its staff. Presumably Mr James has willingly supported that.
As a general matter, public services are paid for by taxation. The present government argues that we need lower taxation to encourage an increase in our economic performance, which is now the worst –except for Russia – amongst the 20 major nations of the world. However, Britain’s taxation has already for some time been amongst the lowest in Europe, while comparable countries, such as Scandinavian, France, Germany, have both higher taxation and better economic performance.
They also have better public services, compared with Britain, Germany spends over 60 per cent more per head of the population on health services, and France spends over 25 per cent more.
You get what you pay for!
There is no room here to look at other strike backgrounds, but as a general point pay rises in public service sectors have fallen notably behind those in the private sector, which is a key factor in the strikes
John Tippler
Spalding
