Of course I support the strike. How could I not?

by Martin Odoni

Two years ago I argued against ‘clapping for the NHS’ because I thought it was futile and a cover for Tory manipulation and greed. As long as Rishi Sunak stood on the steps of 11 Downing Street and applauded into the air, the Conservatives looked like they might care at least a little about thousands of health staff and careworkers nationwide endangering their own lives to fight a lethal pandemic.

A free gift for the Tory Public Relations team, sparing them the task of acknowledging that the long-suffering NHS workforce were going above and beyond the call of duty, and it was time they received substantial recognition.

The NHS workers went through two years of poor supplies, enormous overstretch, and Government stupidity guiding the public to do only what could make everything worse, and not once – not once – did they withdraw their labour. There was a very real crisis and they were the only ones who could fight it. Certainly the Government could not.

The truth is, that pandemic has not really gone. It is just the Government and their allies in the mainstream media are now largely ignoring it, because they realise that dealing with it properly would involve more lockdowns, which are bad for business. And by business, they of course mean it in the very narrowest sense of making sure the well-lined pockets of the Tory support base continue to be lined ever further. So no one really discusses it anymore now, except when making excuses for the economy’s disintegration. If the media do not mention it, it encourages the country to ignore it more widely.

The problem for the Tories now though, is that having established the fantasy that “the pandemic is over,” the official position must be that the crisis is over. And that means the NHS workers are no longer constrained by it, and have a freer hand. They know that refusing absolute co-operation will not have the same repercussions that it would have had in 2020. After what they have been put through in their work-lives, they simply cannot endure the similar strain the surging inflation and the deepening recession are having on the rest of their lives. They need financial help, they have a moral right to that help, and they have earned that help, in ways no mere politician has ever done.

That the labour so many workers are temporarily withdrawing is so necessary is precisely the point. That is why they should be paid more and, just for once, the Government can fight inflation by bullying someone richer.

If the work is necessary, so are better rewards for it

Sunak is the best Prime Minister we have had all year, but still a lousy one. The insatiable epitome of neoliberal greed, he refuses to meet the demand for an above-inflation pay-rise. This is after a decade of public sector pay-freezes imposed by the Tories – pay-freezes never extended to MPs of course. He is a billionaire with no clue what living from pay cheque to pay cheque is like. But he fears that pay increases (in the public sector, which does not run on a system of profits and losses?) would only make the inflation worse.

Sunak could try reducing the swollen size of the nation’s money supply by imposing some imaginative new taxes on landlords who have raked in masses of newly-issued currency provided by the furlough scheme at the height of the pandemic, and simply cancelling the receipts out of existence. But no, that might upset the many landlords in the House of Commons. Better just to make the long-suffering ordinary people suffer even more and even longer instead.

But this is simply unsustainable. Too many people are already at the tipping point. Or do the Tories really think that they can just keep tightening and tightening the screw on so many people already living below the living wage indefinitely? After years of ‘necessary Austerity’ have pushed the vulnerable of the UK into dire straits, they are being told to expect effective pay cuts on top of all the service cuts? Once again, no one else will be asked to endure a burden? On the day of the latest strike, the Bank Of England raised interest rates again. Someone has to say to the British State that this is wrong.

As ever of course, we are told that none of this is the fault of the Conservatives. Nothing ever is, is it? Amazing, they have been in office for nigh-on thirteen years, they have butchered the public sector to the edge of extinction, they have carried out a completely useless and botched withdrawal of the nation from the European Union purely to settle an internal party split, they mishandled the pandemic response like a circus act, and they have an Opposition Labour Party that agrees with about ninety per cent of what they are doing and keeps lapsing into infighting to the point they can never actually oppose. And yet, despite having almost everything that matters their own way, the Tories want us to believe they are somehow ‘powerless’ and act out of necessity, not choice. Lies reinforcing cruelty and rapacity. Or maybe they are such incompetents they do not know what to do?

So the Government is malicious to the point of downright evil, or is completely inept. There is no third option, and the first two both demand serious opposition action. If it will not come from the Labour Party, and they made very clear that all they will oppose is a Labour leader who fights against Austerity, then it must come from the public, and from the workers in industry. It must come in the form of resistance instead of the form of political debate. That action is now getting the blame.

Not from me though. I support the strikes. Any less would support the fall of this country into a tax haven playground of the decadent rich.