Oh to be in Scotland now that Nicola is throwing money around like tomorrow will never come. Friday’s dailymash, the excellent spoof newspaper, ran an article on the Scottish leader’s decision to pay nurses in Scotland a four per cent pay rise. The sub-headings included: Blatant bribery; England’s NHS will be wrecked – which is what the Scots want; It will win Sturgeon votes; and Scotland will become independent. Sometimes spoofdom is closer to the truth than we imagine.
Clearly, this is bribery, it risks an exodus of nurses from the NHS in England, and it is designed to secure Nicola’s future with the aim of achieving Scottish independence. Anyone thinking otherwise is misguided. But there are two inseparable questions related to this decision and these are: do nurses deserve a pay rise; and do they deserve a pay rise at this time? My answer to both questions is a resounding ‘no’ and that includes the one per cent offer in England. No, because nurses do not deserve a pay rise; they have not done anything notable—other than their jobs—during the pandemic, and no because they have been in full employment throughout. Over ten million people have been furloughed during the pandemic and over half a million jobs have disappeared. When the lockdown is finally lifted and the furlough well runs dry, the number of unemployed will inevitably increase.
The amount of money required to award nurses and other NHS workers a reasonable pay rise is, admittedly, paltry compared with the money that is being thrown into lockdown. We spend more in one day on the lockdown than it would take for one year of a pay rise. But this is not the point. Apart from the fact that most NHS workers, including nurses, probably never encountered a COVID-19 patient, they signed up to do a job that they always knew would be hard. Some on the ‘front line’ have had an increased workload and a stressful time and some have even died in the course of their duty. But, by way of comparison, have we ever heard front line soldiers returning, for example, from Afghanistan where they were shot at, witnessed comrades dying and had to work in a very hostile and stressful environment complaining? Some who did return now have stumps for legs, arms missing and worse as the outcome of IEDs. Yet, when they are interviewed about their experience they inevitably say: ‘we were just doing our job; that’s what we signed up for.’ I have never heard any of them asking for a pay rise. Moreover, I have never heard any member of the public or a politician saying they should have a pay rise.
What Nicola Sturgeon has done is divisive, deliberately so. Undoubtedly, nurses in Scotland will be delighted and nurses in England will be hopeful. But Sturgeon has also exploited nurses in Scotland for her own ends. She has given the nursing unions, in particular the Royal College of Nursing of the United Kingdom, a conundrum. They have always been opposed to differential pay rates for nurses across the UK, apart from the London allowance that is paid to nurses working in London. Will the Royal College of Nursing in Scotland turn down the pay rise? If they accept the pay rise, they are effectively admitting they are no longer part of a UK-wide organisation and this once great professional body will have been seriously undermined. Nicola, you didn’t see that coming, did you?
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