The ingratitude of the nursing profession has already been referred to in these pages. The problem with the nurses going on strike is that they will make us all poor long before we can make them rich. It looks very likely that nurses in England will take two days of strike action prior to Christmas. North of the border, Nicola Sturgeon—always prone to largesse with the billions of pounds that Scotland receives each year from those of us paying taxes in the rest of the United Kingdom—seems to have bought them off.
The nursing profession whose major trade union the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) was traditionally committed to not taking strike action, changed its mind many years ago. To date, however, they have not taken strike action in the United Kingdom. Many nurses are also in TUC affiliated trade unions such as UNISON. These have never been opposed to taking strike action, but realised that taking it without the major union, the RCN, also acting would be futile.
Of course, nurses are in the horns of a dilemma over strike action. If they take strike action and, as they are promising to do, ensure that no patients suffer or die, then nobody will pay them much attention. On the other hand, if they take effective strike action that endangers patients then, while they may win an award, they will lose the sympathy of the public.
The problem with awarding a substantial pay rise to nurses is that there are over 300,000 of them working in the NHS in England. Of the £170 billion NHS England budget, based on the average salary of a nurse being £37,000 this means that around £11 billion is spent employing nurses alone. Asking for a 15% pay rise would add over £1.5 billion to the nurses pay budget, bearing in mind that the pay demand is not only for nurses but for all ‘NHS workers’ meaning that this is bound to be an underestimate.
In an ideal world we would all be millionaires but, reluctant as I am to agree with Rishi Sunak, a nurse pay rise is ‘unaffordable’. The country is on its financial uppers trying to recover from the disaster that was lockdown, the vast amounts of money spent on face masks, testing and tracing (£37 billion to no avail), unused respirators, unused Nightingale hospitals and the array of posters and stickers that festooned our streets warning us of Armageddon. It hardly needs to be restated, but while many languished on furlough, some from jobs to which they would never return, nurses were paid throughout the lockdown and some of those were much less busy than they were in normal times. We are also funding a war that we have no business getting involved in, facilitating daily invasions on our shores of illegal immigrants who end up better off in terms of housing and benefits than many unemployed citizens and inflation has been at record level since summer.
There is only one possible source of money to fund a pay increase for nurses and that is to print more money or, with the demise of hard cash, to create more money electronically. After all, this is what we did during lockdown, and that worked well. If the nurses are awarded a pay rise, the rest of the NHS will want it, then other sectors and the computer servers at the Bank of England (or wherever money is ‘created’) will overheat. Worse still, with all this false money sloshing around, the economy will overheat as people think they have money to spend and that can only drive further inflation. Nurses may feel better off for a while but in due course, along with the rest of us, they will become much worse off. They will have achieved that and also made themselves less popular in the process.
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