Goodwill to all, even the NHS strikers… until blameless men, women and children start dying over Christmas
NOBODY blames nurses, paramedics nor ambulance drivers for the catastrophic shambles which has brought the creaking NHS to the point of collapse.
Not yet.
Not until blameless men, women and children start dying over Christmas — as they certainly will — because 999 calls go unattended and nurses walk out for the first time in history.
It beggars belief in this so-called season of goodwill that our revered angels are willing to join a ruthless political strike which will harm people poorer and weaker than themselves.
Asked yesterday if people will die, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly retorted: “I am not going to speculate.”
NHS chief Sir Stephen Powis said: “Nobody wants that.”
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The correct answer is: Yes, people WILL die, needlessly, while waiting in cruel desperation for emergency care which will not come.
If so, striking nurses, ambulance drivers and paramedics will forfeit the trust, affection and sympathy which is their right.
As long-suffering families face yet another Christmas blighted by “Lockdown 2”, the risk of a public backlash is not lost on ministers, whose handling of this crisis has been abysmal.
Nor on the Labour Party, which has pocketed £15million from union paymasters in the two years since Sir Keir Starmer became leader.
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Many affected by this industrial strife are themselves struggling to heat homes and put food on the table.
The vast majority are poorer than striking train drivers on an average £59,000 a year who will withdraw services essential for them to earn a living.
This is a power struggle for very high stakes.
And if we are to believe polls showing its lead over the Tories has halved in recent days, it is not going all Labour’s way.
Self-inflicted wound
Which explains why the party is distancing itself from the stonking 19 per cent pay demand from the nurses’ trade union, the Royal College of Nursing.
Nurses deserve a decent rise, but even the RCN now sees this preposterous claim as a self-inflicted wound and is desperate to reopen talks.
There is no such self-awareness among hard-Left bully boys such as RMT leader Mick Lynch nor civil service union chief Mark Serwotka.
Vindictively, they have sched- uled weeks of “strike hell” in the run-up to Christmas.
Make no mistake, this is not just a pay dispute, it is a coordinated campaign to bring down an elected Tory govern- ment.
Up to 100,000 RCN members will walk out on Thursday.
Rail workers will down tools on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, hitting pubs, shoppers, commuters and party-goers.
Postal workers have more or less packed up, leaving a mountain of Christmas mail that won’t be delivered until February.
Many strikers are demanding inflation-matching pay rises costing an estimated £28billion — or £1,000 for every house- hold.
PM Rishi Sunak insists: “I’m not going to ask ordinary families up and down the country to pay an extra £1,000 a year to meet the pay demands of the union bosses.”
He could also mention the £31billion he paid out as Chancellor to keep rail workers in their jobs during Covid — more than £300,000 per railman, says Downing Street.
Far from starving the public sector, the Tories have spent the past 12 years pumping taxpayers’ cash down its throat.
The NHS budget, already at record levels, shot up by £16BILLION in the past year — some meant for nurses’ pay — all gobbled by a ramshackle bureaucracy already demanding more.
Taxpayers are getting nothing in return apart from ballooning waiting lists for lifesaving treatment often delivered too late to save lives.
Cash injections
A shocking 411,000 are waiting more than a year for surgery.
Almost 40,000 are stuck for more than 12 hours in A&E.
The Tories have promised a ban on strikes in essential services such as the NHS and railways.
Both have enjoyed massive cash injections without the slightest pressure from ministers or employers to modernise.
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Indeed, as The Sun’s political editor Harry Cole revealed last week, then PM David Cameron secretly plotted with union barons to ditch anti-strike laws in return for trying to block Brexit.
Arguably, Cameron’s duplicity opened the doors to our current Winter of Discontent.
Ginger and Whinger
ANGRY Brits want Harry and Meghan stripped of their titles for mocking the late Queen and branding the UK racist.
The Palace, perhaps afraid of seeming spiteful, has no apparent plan to do so.
Now Tory MP Bob Seely has teed up a Commons vote, taking the decision out of Palace hands and making it “political”.
At present his chances are probably 50-50.
But three more episodes of the cringeworthy £100million Netflix docu might tip the balance and transform Ginger and Whinger into plain Mr and Mrs Windsor.