The longer these walkouts carry on, the more public support is flatlining
DRUNK with power, the trade unions are seeking to deepen the public’s misery with their addiction to turmoil.
A spirit of anarchy and arrogance is sweeping across the public sector, prompting a wave of industrial action that seems to have no end in sight.
Train drivers, rail workers, university lecturers, postal staff, teachers and civil servants are all currently involved in bitter disputes.
But what makes this unrest even more shocking is the behaviour of some of the NHS unions.
In an outrageous twist that contradicts their talk about service and care, they have shown their willingness to put patients’ lives at risk in support of their pay claims.
Junior doctors of the British Medical Association have just voted overwhelmingly in favour of a three-day stoppage to back their colossal, unaffordable 26 per cent pay claim.
Similarly Pat Cullen, the firebrand leader of the Royal College of Nursing — which has demanded a 17.2 per cent rise in pay — is now seeking to escalate the destructive impact of her strike.
Not only has she increased strike pay per day by 60 per cent from £50 to £80 to persuade more nurses to take action, but she has even called on her members in accident and emergency units, cancer wards and intensive care teams to join the walkout.
Meanwhile, the unions who represent the ambulance workers, 11,000 of whom were on strike yesterday, are causing real harm and anxiety to the public.
Once the representatives of admired, hard-working professionals, the NHS unions and the BMA increasingly resemble a protection racket.
Throughout the current turmoil, union bosses have parroted calls for the Government to “get round the table and start pay talks.”
But how can balanced negotiations be held when one side is willing to indulge in a type of blackmail over public health?
The unions in the NHS and indeed right across the state sector argue that they have been forced into this drastic action because of poverty pay and the need to fight underfunding by the Tory Government.
“We are in despair, frustrated and angry,” said the junior doctors’ leader Robert Laurenson.
But in truth, Government spending has never been higher — which explains why the tax burden is at its highest level since the 1940s — while many of the striking state employees are far better paid than private workers.
Moreover, they have much bigger pensions, longer holidays, greater job security and shorter hours.
An experienced paramedic, for instance, can be on £47,000-a-year, while the average pay for nurses is £35,000,
Nor is there any proof that pouring more money into pay packets will do anything to improve the quality of ramshackle services.
It hasn’t worked with the rail industry — where the median salary for strike-happy train drivers is £59,000 — and it didn’t work for GPs, who in 2004 were given a contract that increased their pay in return for shorter hours.
Job security
Since then, the once admired GP service has been in a state of drastic decline.
But for many of the militants, hostility towards the present Government is just as big a factor as higher pay.
Filled with loathing for the Tories, they see strikes as a political weapon that can bring about the triumph of socialism.
When the rail stoppages began last summer, the RMT leader Mick Lynch declared with a Marxist revolutionary flourish: “We are in a class struggle now.
“Are you going to be with us or are you going to be on the sidelines until the Tories butcher the working class?”
In the same vein, the junior doctors’ advocate Enma Runswick describes herself as an “unashamed socialist” who wants to turn the BMA into a “fighting union.”
But much of the public sees through all this bluster and bombast.
Socialist Revolution
They do not want the socialist revolution, just decent, efficient services.
As the disputes intensify, their sympathy for the strikers is evaporating, particularly because many of them earn far less than the state employees.
Indeed, the stoppages are having much less of an impact than the unions hoped.
Stoical Britons tend to greet the news of another walkout with just a shrug then get on with their normal existences where they can.
It has become like the weather forecast.
They know that there is more to life than the public sector and its perpetually aggrieved workforce.
Rail strikes can be avoided to an extent by working from home, while civil service strikes only expose how bloated and unnecessary much of the state’s bureaucracy really is.
And the NHS is so badly mismanaged and in such drastic need of reform that much of the industrial action is lost amid the usual chronic failings.
The unions might enjoy flexing their muscles, but their escalation of the disputes is really a sign of weakness.
They are losing the argument so they are lashing out.
But they will only damage themselves further.
As they wave their fists on the picket lines, they worsen public disillusion with their movement and dramatically reinforce the case for real change in the public sector.