Government anti-strike laws declare their fiasco

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“We must ensure the safety of the British public.” Those were the words Grant Shapps used as he stood in the dispatch box in the House of Commons as he introduced legislation to limit the right to strike for doctors, nurses, firefighters and more.

We must ensure the safety of the British public. It is widely understood that this is the first – and to some extent the only – function of government. If the government cannot guarantee the safety of the people, it will cease to be a government at the next available opportunity.

And so we turn, at this point, to the numbers released today by the Office for National Statistics. In the week ending December 30, 2022, there were 9,517 deaths recorded in England and Wales. This is 20 percent higher than the five-year average. One thousand six hundred excess deaths cannot be easily explained.

Death is really one of the main indicators by which you can measure the progress of your government in its main function of ensuring the safety of the public. Dying is, after all, one of the most unsafe things you can do. Or call 999 because you have chest pains, only to be told you’d better drive yourself to the hospital, then crash the car in the hospital car park because you’ve gone into cardiac arrest: that’s the thing that really puts bungee jumping in New Zealand in the shadows. However, that is exactly what happened earlier this week, in this, still one of the richest countries in the world.

At least, that’s according to a stressed and depressed ambulance dispatcher who spoke to the BBC anonymously. He, like many others, is about to quit his job because he can’t stand its misery. To take calls from people desperate for emergency help, telling them they’ll have to wait because all his ambulances are queuing outside hospitals, paramedics coming in and out of them, switching in and out of 12-hour shifts, just wait-waiting. – until the patient lying in the ambulance is taken to the hospital.

That was the paramedics’ life every day for several months. Well, not every day, maybe. Because over the course of two days this winter, a limited number of first aid funds went on limited strikes, and some of them planned more action for later this month.

And so, at Wanderers Shapes, to declare: “We must ensure the safety of the British public.” Declaring, with these words, the fiasco of his government.

Anyone paying even attention to the news hasn’t gone more than two minutes, it seems, for months, without hearing another NHS horror story. of heart patients sit in A&E for days on end. of elderly patients trapped in the wards, suffering from ailments that were not present when they arrived. Labour’s Angela Rayner had no particular difficulty telling Shapps of one of her own who had died while waiting for an ambulance; They didn’t die waiting because the ambulance drivers were on strike, but because the ambulance personnel were sitting around wasting their time outside the hospitals – literally wasting the lives of others.

Shapps argued that such legislation was necessary to achieve “minimum safety standards”. That it is necessary to bring this country “in harmony with France, Germany and Italy”.

Why hasn’t this been done before? If the lack of anti-strike legislation for nurses, firefighters and ambulance drivers leaves everyone at great risk, why should we move to introduce it now? Mrs. Thatcher wasn’t exactly known for making life easier for strikers, but she didn’t seem to take this decisive action to “ensure the safety of the British public” either. why not?

The simple answer is we didn’t need to. The Royal College of Nursing has never gone on strike before. The last time ambulance workers went on any kind of strike was 30 years ago. why? Because they actually care about ensuring the safety of the British public. It’s not something they just say they do. They get up every morning and do it.

Half the reason for the strike is that the situation became so hopeless that they found themselves unable to do so.

The problem that the government has faced, and will continue to face, is that the British public has so precisely defined who it is that it does not guarantee their safety. They will take appropriate action at the ballot box.

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