The Tories, Not British Workers, Are to Blame for the Unraveling of the UK’s Public Services
Thanks to over a decade of Conservative-imposed austerity, the UK’s public services are stretched to the breaking point. Public sector workers are going on strike to save the country’s public goods from dangerous underfunding.
This year’s NHS staff survey found that only 21 percent of nurses felt there was enough staff for them to do their jobs properly. (EMILY KASK/AFP via Getty Images)
Recent weeks have seen government ministers and media pundits grow desperate, trotting out the most absurd lines on public sector workers striking for better pay and conditions. For Nadhim Zahawi, the man who claimed £5,822 on expenses to heat his riding stables at his second home and banked £1.3 million from an oil company while sitting as an MP, nurses demanding better than a real-terms pay cut are playing into the hands of Vladimir Putin and his plan to divide the West. His cabinet colleagues have tended to stick to the better-trodden routes, instead striking out at those on the front line of public health for putting lives at risk in taking industrial action.
The government presents us with a false dichotomy: public sector workers can either accept a pay cut and get back to work saving lives in a functioning system, or they can be greedy, abandon the public, and strike. But to make this argument is to intentionally misrepresent the link between poor pay and conditions and public safety. The desperation of the establishment to undermine working people and crush the unions that represent them pales in comparison to the desperation nurses, paramedics, and firefighters — among others — feel at the state of their services after a decade of battering. And in the face of a government that refuses to listen, strike action is their last resort.
The retention and recruitment crisis within the National Health Service (NHS) is a case in point. Over a decade of real-terms pay cuts and growing workloads has led to a self-perpetuating exodus of nurses: in the year up to June 2022, the equivalent of one in nine left the NHS. Wards, as a result, are dangerously understaffed, and those who remain in them are exhausted and, if still in training, often expected to operate above their level of competency, pushing them closer to leaving in turn. This year’s NHS staff survey found that only 21 percent of nurses felt there were enough staff for them to do their jobs properly. Things, in other words, are already unsafe — and only upping retention by improving pay and conditions can change that.
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