Here’s a thought. How would you tell if your MP is on strike? Especially if they were a backbencher. Under no obligation to do anything very much. Just take a look at the chamber of the House of Commons – Tuesday’s statement on industrial action, for example – and it’s seldom more than a quarter full. If that.
Some may be involved on committee or constituency business. But it’s fair to assume some might just have decided, after the appropriate consultation with themselves, to withdraw their labour. To picket by pursuing an alternative career.
Take Theresa May. Since 2019, she has pocketed the best part of £2.5m for public speaking. And she hasn’t even given me a 15% agent’s fee. I made her. Without me she would be just another washed up Tory prime minister whom everyone would rather forget. But I created her Maybot persona and people are queueing up to hear her give ponderously dull, monochrome speeches. Just for the lols.
Take Boris Johnson. He’s raked in the best part of £1m in less than a month. No wonder he’s not sure how seriously to take Nadine Dorries’s efforts to reinstate him as prime minister. He’s not sure if he can afford such a drop in salary. No wonder he’s out on strike. His terms and conditions are at risk of being unilaterally rewritten.
Then there’s John Redwood. Someone has paid him an extra £700,000 over the past three years. Why? He’s known to be certifiable. Guaranteed to be wrong on almost any topic. Other Tories must be green with envy. You get the picture.
So what about Steve Barclay? He’s not officially on strike. Though he might as well be. The excess deaths through the underfunding of the NHS are staggering even when no staff are taking industrial action. The health secretary has a duty of care to the country that he is clearly not fulfilling. At the next cabinet meeting, Grant Shapps should suggest that Baldrick Barclay gets the sack. It’s what the government would have wanted.
Same with the transport secretary. The trains don’t operate a recognisable minimum service level even on non-strike days. The Avanti West Coast line is a joke. Bye-bye Mark Harper.
Which brings us to Rishi Sunak. It’s hard to think of one area of government that is functioning properly. He is the politician’s anti-politician. The man who fails at politics 101. Give him a choice and he’s a certainty to pick the wrong one. His efforts fall well below any minimum safety level. He’s a liability to himself and the country.
At some level, the government recognises this. None more so than Shapps. The business secretary has stared into the abyss. Had it been during the Johnson or the Truss administrations, he would have been far more gung-ho about introducing new trade union legislation. Grant would have been the first to channel his inner Norman Tebbit with a triumphalist Thatcherite agenda. It’s what comes most naturally to him.
Instead, it was a more emollient – almost apologetic – Shapps that gave a statement on the new union proposals. As though he understood that taking on the nurses and the ambulance drivers wasn’t the wisest of moves as most of the country supported the NHS staff. So he wanted to say how much he loved the nurses – couldn’t manage without them – and he was just hoping to nudge the ambulance drivers into being a bit more organised about service levels on strike days.
Hopefully this legislation would never need to be called on. It was just a failsafe. It wasn’t about curbing union powers. Heaven forbid. He couldn’t understand why opposition MPs were saying it was. All he wanted to do was to bring the UK in line with other western countries such as France, Spain and Germany. How could anyone possibly object?
Let Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, enlighten him. For one thing, if the government really wanted to make sure the health service was running safely, it should be going the extra mile to resolve the industrial disputes. Had it not occurred to Shapps or Rish! that one of the main reasons the NHS was at breaking point was because there were so many staff vacancies. And the NHS couldn’t recruit because people didn’t want to work burn-out shifts and still rely on foodbanks to get by.
It was also disingenuous to blame everything on Covid and the war in Ukraine. Other countries were coping far better than we were. And what about the government’s own efforts to turbo boost inflation and crash the economy with the seven-week Trussterfuck rollercoaster? And another thing. The ambulance workers had agreed a minimum safety level on a region by region basis. And another thing. European Union legislation was far more liberal than ours already. So what was the problem?
A few Tories stood up to give Shapps support. They’d waited months for some decent union bashing and weren’t going to miss out. Even if they weren’t entirely sure of what the problem really was. Richard Drax just wondered why we couldn’t bring in the army to deal with everything. There’s always one.
In any case, they were drowned out by the opposition benches. Andy McDonald pointed out that the government’s own impact assessment of the proposed legislation was that it would be unworkable and would lead to even more strikes. Rachael Maskell observed there were more excess deaths on working days than strike days, and the solution was to fix the NHS. The SNP’s Chris Stephens noted that all unions had emergency cover on strike days.
Inevitably it all petered out with Shapps insisting he knew best. And if people didn’t agree with him, he would go on strike. Not that anyone would notice.
