I AM old enough to recall an era when strikes were commonplace. That was a long time ago. As a consequence the current round of strikes are an almost unknown phenomenon for most people, politicians included. Unsurprisingly, as a result a lot of nonsense is being said about them.
Standing back from the individual disputes and looking at them as a collective phenomena, three things are pretty apparent.
First, there is a not unreasonable desire on the part of mainly public sector workers to maintain their real incomes in the light of 10% inflation and many private sector workers enjoying pay rises not far short of that.
Second, there is a protest element to the strikes. The workloads of those remaining in the public sector become intolerable as increasing numbers of well qualified people leave because they cannot either make ends meet or survive the intolerable strain of working in underfunded services.
Third, there is also an element of desperation on the part of many workers who want to point out that the services they are working in have reached breaking point. Something needs to be done to prevent the failure of the services they work for.
In my opinion all three reasons for striking are justifiable. What is required is a grown up response from politicians in Westminster and a firm passing of the buck their way, tinged with heavy doses of independence rhetoric from Holyrood.
This is because the Westminster excuses for not paying wage rises, which in turn constrains the Scottish government’s ability to do so, are all false.
Firstly they say there is no money. That is not true.
To pay all public sector workers inflation matching pay rises would cost about £28 billion. It is likely 40 per cent of that would come straight back to the government as combined tax and national insurance payments, and further taxes would also be paid as this pay was spent, as it inevitably would be. After all the tax consequences of this are accounted for (remembering that the people the money is spent with will also pay tax), it is likely that the real cost of this pay rise is very small.
But that’s not the only reason why money is available. The UK Government could also find the funds elsewhere.
For example, over £30bn will be paid in 2023 as interest to commercial banks on the deposit account balances they hold with the Bank of England (below) that were effectively gifted to them by the quantitative easing process. There is no legal reason why this interest needs to be paid. It is a voluntary payment that could be stopped or heavily reduced. That could pay for all the public sector pay rises. But the government is choosing not to do that.
Secondly, the government says that funding inflation-matching pay rises will create a wage-driven inflation spiral. However, new research from the International Monetary Fund shows that this almost never happens. Instead, wage rises after inflation are used to restore real wage rates and very rarely increase them. The inflation ogre is being used here to try to suppress real wages when there is no need to do so, politics apart.
Third, the real issue in these strikes is that continual underfunding of public services has brought them to the brink of collapse. It is not workers going on strike who are not doing their jobs. It is the Tory Westminster government (aided and abetted by a Labour Party who seem as keen on austerity as the Tories are) that are creating the crisis in public services.
No health care worker wants to leave someone outside A&E for twelve hours. No teacher wants to make life difficult for children, or their parents. It is a lack of funding that does that.
In that context I hear Scottish government ministers saying they are constrained in what they do by Westminster, and of course we all know that is true. But what I do not hear is what they would do if they weren’t constrained in that way.
Of course it is great news that independence might now have 56 per cent support in Scotland, but as I say time and again, that won’t necessarily count for much if people do not know what will be different in an independent Scotland.
Since the primary job of government is to supply public services what that means is that an explanation of what public services might be like after independence is needed. In turn that means a pay policy is required and a means of paying must be made clear.
People want a way out of the mess we are in. My question is, what is the SNP’s answer to that? Despite all they have said on independence I really do not know, and this real world detail matters now.
It may just be hypothetical to deal with this question now, but then all opposition politics is about what might happen, and that does not stop the need for the vision that leads to power. Might we have it, please?
