Tax-paying plebeian, after the public sector strikes

 

 

It’s still freezing outside and the strikes are ongoing but the good news is that there are only four days to the Winter Solstice when the days will get longer. Today’s ‘news’ are suitably mixed, from the nurses’ trade union chief telling the PM ‘to get a grip’ to a warning in The Star aimed at turning one’s stomach. You have to scroll down right to the bottom in the usual place (link).

There are some ‘gems’ sprinkled across the online MSM which illustrate how out-of-touch our esteemed ‘authors’ in said publications are. It’s as if it is suddenly uncouth to point out to the trade unions, especially the nurses’ one, some plain truths. Firstly though see this:

“Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing. In an interview with The Times, she urged Rishi Sunak to “step in” amid an increasingly acrimonious dispute and “get a grip of this before it engulfs the NHS” (link, paywalled)

Oh dear. So the NHS, heaving with ‘trust bosses’ and directors, is incapable of negotiating salaries on its own? It needs the PM to step in? In all other instances involving the NHS those bosses are doing fine, the ‘Health Minister’ is only needed to sign off on their proposals – or to take the responsibility when NHS things go wrong. Next:

“​​Thousands of hospital patients will be sent home early as the NHS prepares for next week’s walkouts, with the head of the nursing union warning action will escalate in the new year. A letter sent from health chiefs to hospital managers urged them to discharge as many patients as possible to free up beds before ambulance staff strike on Wednesday. Outpatient clinics could be cancelled so that the doctors running them can be redeployed to help in A&E.” (link, paywalled)

We’ve been there before, during the lockdown years, haven’t we! Note that there are ‘health chiefs’ who can issue orders but apparently cannot negotiate with the RCN. Then there’s the Times columnist Matthew Parris, writing: “Beat the rail unions, then pay nurses more – It’s easy to lump the strikes together but ministers should judge each dispute on the ability of that sector to recruit staff” (link, paywalled).

This Parris proposal is accompanied by a report about rail engineers earning up to £100,000, a report the Times copied from the DM which isn’t paywalled (link). The Times does quote some MPs, saying “[…] the figures […]  “make a mockery” of claims by Mick Lynch, the RMT general secretary, that the strikes were not politically motivated.” (link, paywalled). Now we know why Mr Parris dares to make a stand against the RMT’s rapacious boss!

This begs the question why he or indeed The Times isn’t standing against the rapacious NHS. After all, there’s a report in the DM which they also could’ve copied. Under the headline: “Want £115,000-a-year? Apply for the latest woke NHS role: Fury over advert for a ‘director of lived experience’ who is able to create ‘brave spaces’ for staff and patients” we read:

“With record backlogs, an unprecedented nurses’ strike and typical winter pressures already putting immense strain on the NHS, one might think bosses would be pumping every penny into frontline care. But instead the cash-strapped health service has posted an advert for a £115,000-a-year ‘director of lived experience’, who is capable of creating ‘brave spaces’. Critics argued the six-figure role was a ‘kick in the teeth’ to taxpayers, as millions of patients wait on the elective care backlog.” (link)

Isn’t it also a kick in the teeth to all those striking nurses? You might like to scroll down a bit, the DM has copied the NHS ‘advert’ in all its hair-raising inanity. I assume the NHS chief, a certain Ms Amanda Pritchard, has signed off on this waste. May we however ask where she is in these strike negotiations? Her absence in all those reports is a bit conspicuous. After all, she is the ‘chief’, right? Is she perhaps frit, has she perhaps been bullied by the Chief Nurse, Ms Pat Cullen? Or is Ms Prichard still working on designing those uniforms for menopausal nurses?

Clearly, these facts are known in the corridors of the Westminster MSM. Clearly they are known in the corridors of Parliament. Clearly they are known in the ‘corridors of power’, i.e. Whitehall. Clearly, we peasants know that these strikes are political, that they are being promoted so uncritically in the MSM because that unholy Westminster cabal is working hard to get Labour into No 10. They’re therefore unwilling to scupper their future access to ‘sources’ once they’ve got the ‘regime change’ they crave.

We plebs have also noted that these strikes are about pay in the public sector. These pay rises will be paid by us, with even higher taxes. This will inevitably lead to more inflation and thus more demands. There’s one lot of workers who have also voted to go on strike. Auntie B had an one-sided report, heaving with outrage (link), picked up by The Times, headlined: “Amazon faces first strike over £15-an-hour pay claim at Coventry depot” (link, paywalled). Better not mention that the Trade Union demand of £15 means a rise of 50% – the nurses and RTM workers might get envious!

Should we now expect demands for similar pay rises across the private sector, never mind how these will turn into a lovely inflation spiral? After all, for wages to rise prices must rise and so the poor NHS and rail workers will need more money. Are perhaps the PM and especially the Treasury extremely relaxed about these inflationary demands because more money will flood into their coffers thanks to more taxes? Aww, perish the thought!

I leave you with a beautiful piece of news from the EU. Elon Musk had suspended some lefty US journalists from twitter. Now see this, from the DT report:

“Elon Musk has crossed a “red line” the EU said after threatening him with sanctions for abruptly suspending high-profile journalists who have written reports about him.  Accounts belonging to nearly a dozen prominent reporters, including those working for The New York Times, CNN and Washington Post, were locked on Thursday evening, after their employers published critical stories about Twitter which Mr Musk previously bought.  Věra Jourová, vice-president for values and transparency at the European Union Commission, tweeted that the “arbitrary suspension of journalists from Twitter was worrying.” “There are red lines. And sanctions, soon,” she added. Mr Musk had accused the journalists of posting his real-time location, which he referred to as “basically assassination coordinates”. He said that doing so was a “direct violation of Twitter terms of service”. (paywalled link)

A bit later Al Beeb reported that even the UN ‘condemned’ these bans (link). For light entertainment you might scroll down a bit in that report because there an interesting wail from one of those banned … strange that we never read any outcry in the MSM about all those who were banned, ‘BM’, ’Before Musk’, for example the covid critics. Where was yon EU Commissar ‘for values’ then? 

Now though the outcry was huge! How dare he! Free Speech and all that, innit! Never mind that none of those journalists and publications cried out when scientists and science reporters were banned, never mind that they told us, ‘BM’, that twitter was a private company which could do as they like. As usual – it’s different when they’re concerned. As usual, ‘values’ are not = ‘values’. However, all is now good: Musk has reinstated those culprits, after polling twitter users who voted against that ban (link). Democratic or what! Or did Musk cave in to the threats from the mighty EU? 

And so, as the days march inexorably towards the Winter Solstice and the end of this year, with further instances of those ‘in power’ showing us how out of touch they are with the reality of our lives, let’s keep ourselves to ourselves while we watch with scorn how the players in the Westminster cabal are sliding into a deep ditch of their own making. The time for pointing fingers at them and laugh will come – trust me!



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