HAVING already endured many years of below-inflation pay, NHS nurses have now been told that they will not get a rise. Anger is mounting over their exclusion from last week’s public-sector pay award, as the majority of experienced NHS nurses have not seen any significant improvement in their take-home pay from the last three-year deal.

The flames of anger are being fanned further by pronouncements that nurses have already received a pay rise, back in April. Equally, arguments that nurses “are lucky to have jobs” in the face of mass redundancies are going down like a lead balloon.

Nurses, who have risked their lives during the pandemic, were hopeful that the government would play fair and reward them. But they now feel utterly betrayed and their mood is volatile. It takes a lot to goad the average nurse to anger at the way they are treated, but the Tories have succeeded in this feat. 

Tory MPs have voted against protecting the health service in the putative trade deal with the United States and it is now clear that their overall aim is the full privatisation of the NHS. Demoralising the NHS workforce is a key plank of their cuts-and-privatisation agenda.

The vast majority of nurses are under constant pressure to put patients before their own health and well-being. Too few face up to the fact that if they are exhausted, overly stressed and unwell, they cannot look after patients properly. Skipping breaks and working overtime for free has been normalised in the NHS, as the most experienced — and most burnt-out — nurses continue to leave the service in droves. Nurses find that shifts are short-staffed, that they have to rely on agency workers who don’t know the area and that they have so many patients to look after and tasks to juggle that they cannot operate safely.

Increasing numbers of nurses go to work every day knowing that staffing levels are so compromised that they will be forced to practise unsafely. If there is a serious incident leading to injury or death, these nurses will end up facing the music in a coroner’s court or internal disciplinary proceedings. To add insult to injury, the disciplinary panels are often presided over by the architects of the catastrophe that led to the serious incident occurring in the first place. These senior managers and directors will get off scot-free as they pin the blame on the unfortunate nurse who failed to speak out — and who wasn’t in a trade union.

For years, a myth prevailed in the NHS that “nurses are not allowed to strike.” This was a golden period for NHS managers, who had free reign over the health service and flung open the doors to cutbacks and privatisation, making working conditions unbearable and leaving patient care to deteriorate. Dedicated staff were successfully pushed to do far more with fewer resources. Filling in piles of paperwork became more important to bosses than ensuring that patients were looked after properly. As the spending on new layers of management, vanity projects and new buildings increased, false excuses abounded that there was no money for safe staffing levels or to improve workers’ pay and terms and conditions.

During the public-sector pensions dispute of the early 2010s, NHS managers continued to peddle the line that clinical staff were putting patients at risk if they dared to engage in industrial action to protect their welfare. The same managers who used the excuse of patient care to obstruct strike action had few qualms about cutting back on staffing while permanently restructuring NHS services. Unfortunately, the idea of planning skeleton cover over Christmas to ensure a balance between patients’ basic care and NHS workers’ democratic right to strike fell by the wayside, as mass exemptions from strike action were pushed though. As trade unions relinquished control of the industrial strategy, a ridiculous situation emerged where some NHS trusts ended up with more staff on shift during the strike days than on normal ones.

Angry NHS nurses are marching in central London from St Thomas’s hospital to Downing Street tonight. As they do so, they can take inspiration from the schools struggle, which successfully defeated dangerous government plans to resume classes for swathes of pupils during the pandemic. The leadership shown by all of the teaching unions, including my own, GMB, managed to unite teaching staff, teaching assistants and parents. This model could be replicated by the health unions, as all the signs are showing that NHS nurses are ready and willing to organise themselves around pay demands.

Union members need to know that their unions are prepared to take all steps necessary to defend them, up to and including balloting for co-ordinated industrial action. It is far better to strike for a limited period than to stand by and do nothing as the right to free healthcare is slowly but surely eroded by the Tories.

The days when NHS managers control the industrial agenda must be consigned to the dustbin of history. The Tories have made a clear political decision to sell off our healthcare system and further demoralise the staff working within it. Health service staff and their trade unions need to be ready to stand with the people to oppose these attacks. Nurses are ready to fight, so for all of our sakes let’s make sure they win.

Visit the March for Pay Justice for NHS & Key Workers event page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1143394586045713/