Nurses reject 5.5% pay offer

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has announced that a vote of its members on whether to accept a 5.5% pay rise offer from the government has been rejected, with two-thirds of members voting against the pay award.

In an ironically well-timed announcement, the RCN announced the members’ rejection of the pay offer, whilst Chancellor Rachel Reeves was in the middle of her Labour party conference speech boasting about how her party had been successful in ending public sector pay strikes!

It is also an embarrassing contravention to the claims made by Wes Streeting last week, when he was quoted as saying: “We inherited a broken NHS…that’s why I made ending the strikes a priority – and we negotiated an end to them in just three weeks”.

The arrogance of Labour party ministers’ self-adulation for supposedly having “ended the strikes” is beginning to look incredibly premature.

In a piece we published here last week, we warned that the government’s capitulation to the demands of the BMA in awarding junior doctors with a 22% pay rise was likely to embolden other public sector pay workers, and the unions that represent them.

Just like negotiating with terrorists, striking workers have seen the extraordinary inflation-busting pay awards being distributed to junior doctors and train drivers (who were awarded a 15% pay rise by Transport Secretary Louise Haigh in August), and understandably their expectations of their own self-worth have risen incrementally as a result.

See the full post on this here: https://www.hawker-gazette.com/post/bma-prove-capitulating-to-unions-akin-to-negotiating-with-terrorists.

Quite reasonably, nurses are looking at how negotiations with the train drivers concluded, and asking the legitimate question: “If they can get an extra 15% for pushing some buttons and working a 35-hour week, in a job that requires no qualifications, then why would we consider accepting less?”

Labour’s naïve determination to bring an end to public sector strikes as quickly as possible regardless of the economic consequences has seen them back themselves into a corner from which they may find it difficult to escape, without further widening the fiscal black hole in the public finances that they seem so keen to talk about.

Don’t be surprised if you find government ministers less inclined to quote the mythical £22 billion figure that they have been quoting ad infinitum in recent weeks, in order to justify upcoming tax rises. The supposed black hole has since been shown to include £9 billion of pay rises that they did not inherit but have themselves awarded since coming into power.

When you also consider the fact that a recent survey by Oxford Economics suggests that the change to the Non-Dom tax legislation proposed by Labour could reduce tax revenues into the treasury by £1 billion per year (in contrast with the £4 billion that Labour claimed in their manifesto that it would generate), suddenly that fiscal black hole is beginning to look like a yawning chasm. A chasm predominantly of their own making, that will be impossible to bridge solely through fleecing pensioners, who seem to be the government’s principle cash cow since taking power.

And now it is becoming increasingly apparent that the astonishing and unaffordable public sector pay rise awards are unlikely to stop any time soon, as greater numbers of workers use the pay rises awarded to junior doctors and train drivers as a negotiation tool to drive up their own demands, and unions who have previously agreed to pay rises for much less return to the table once again to push for a better offer.

Labour promised an end to the strikes. Don’t expect it to come any time soon, and when it does, it will almost certainly be achieved at incredible expense to the British Taxpayer. One that will far exceed the forecasts of the OBR and almost certainly will drive inflation back up from the 2% that was inherited from the previous Tory administration.