With the government poised to introduce legislation to attempt to prevent strikes in the public service, ministers have suggested that they wish to ensure that there is a “minimum level of service”. This is of course following the example of the government itself, which has been providing the minimum level of service for a long time now.
Robert Peston commented that he had “rarely read legislation so lacking in underlying coherence and logic”, which suggests he hasn’t been paying much attention to the Conservative agenda in the last few years.
Making the country a better place
The irony, of course, is that the government couldn’t possibly start sacking nurses or doctors for striking as it would simply make the problems worse. And even if they did sack nurses and doctors, those workers would simply join agencies and be re-employed on higher salaries.
At least with nurses, you know why they went into the profession in the first place – and it’s certainly not for the money. But you have to wonder why someone like Rishi Sunak wanted to be a member of parliament, and then wanted to be prime minister. Again, it’s not for the money: he has more money than he could spend in a hundred lifetimes. That is, unless he decided to do something stupid like buy Twitter, or pay Boris Johnson to choose his wallpaper.
Sunak doesn’t appear to have any deeply entrenched political beliefs about making the country a better place, so what’s his motivation? I can’t help but feel it’s simply because – like David Cameron before him – “I think I’d be good at it”. Well, guess what? He’s not.
A vague sense of money
In a recent BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg, Sunak was asked about the low wages that care workers receive. “There’s a range of things we can do”, said Sunak, “to ensure that people working in social care feel valued and part of that, actually, is giving them a sense of qualifications, professional training and development and a sense of career progression.”
Ah yes, people on low wages don’t want more money. They just want a ‘sense’ that they’re progressing, and to ‘feel valued’. Do you remember all that talk we used to get from the Conservatives about developing a ‘high-wage’ economy? Apparently they didn’t mean by paying people using actual money, just a vague sense of it. I hope that helps with the gas bill.
“Would you do a job as a care worker for eighteen thousand pounds a year?” pressed Kuenssberg.
“Well, the job I’m doing”, replied Sunak, “is making a difference to the country as prime minister”.
There you go, you see! You’ll get a decent salary if what you do makes a difference. Care workers, nurses – all those people we spent months applauding – it looks like they just need to do more so they make a difference. The health secretary, Steve Barclay, even said as much a few days previously, suggesting that nurses need to increase their “productivity”. I wonder how that works. What is it that Barclay thinks nurses are actually producing?
Government productivity
On the other hand, I’d like to see the government increase its own productivity, not least as far as the NHS is concerned. Whatever happened to those 40 new hospitals we were promised? True, the government did manage to create a few new ‘Nightingale’ hospitals during the pandemic; they just forgot to get any nurses to staff them. Oh well, just the £532mn wasted. ‘Lessons learned’, and all that guff. It’s not as if they also spent £37bn on a failed test-and-trace service. What’s that? Oh.
With news of NHS waiting lists continuing to rise, Sunak used prime minister’s questions this week to set out what the Conservatives were going to do about them. “We’re on track this spring to eliminate those waiting 18 months”, he said, “with a clear plan to go further, to eliminate those waiting 52 weeks by next spring”. What? Admittedly, it’s one way to clear your waiting lists, but eliminating people does seem rather extreme.
One reason for the current problems in the NHS is that many patients can’t be discharged, because social care has been so starved of funding for the last 13 years. A suggestion was made this week that the government would start booking hotels to house people who need social care. I wonder if they’ll be the same hotels that are being used for asylum seekers. They could maybe get a discount by block-booking. That all sounds fine, I’m sure, but will there be any hotels left for people going on holiday? I was rather hoping to book a week in Bridlington.
Minimal levels of (government) service
Despite the government’s unwillingness to raise the wages of nurses and other public service workers, there is, however, one area where money is apparently no object: the restoration of parliament. With the overall cost now predicted to be £22bn – yes, that’s billion – isn’t it time we asked whether we are getting value for money from our politicians? Are they providing a “minimum level of service”? Are they “making a difference”?
With Johnson, for example, dismissing his job as an MP as an “unexpected hiatus” and instead being paid millions to repeat the same nonsensical speeches to gullible corporations, isn’t it about time we brought in a law to make MPs turn up for work and do the job they’re paid for? And if they don’t like it, they could go on strike! Unlike the nurses, however, it’s unlikely that we’d notice.
