According to newspapers, the NHS is to be hit by strike action over pay “for the first time in 32 years.”   

This isn’t true. 

Understanding why it isn’t shows how nurses and midwives and healthcare assistants and therapists and porters can win.

To clarify — it’s true that there will be national NHS strikes next week because the pay review body that is supposed to keep the NHS away from taking such action recommended a very mean below-inflation 1 per cent pay rise. 

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said health workers couldn’t even have that. Only staff who were not getting an annual increment could have any basic pay increase. Striking is the only sensible response

But it isn’t true to say that there have been no NHS pay strikes for 32 years. There were indeed national strikes on pay in 1982. They were solid but not very successful.

There were also nurses strikes up and down the Britain over pay in 1988, which put Thatcher on the run. And they won. A year later there was a national ambulance strike that ran like a small-scale repeat of the miners’ strike. Except the ambulance workers won. 

These were strikes against Thatcher after she had supposedly beaten the unions by breaking the miners. But unions were able to fight back. They not only won their pay disputes, they also helped set the limits of Thatcher’s overall victory for over a decade. Understanding how they won then helps show how NHS staff can win now. 

In the mid-1980s the Tories were busy privatising NHS cleaning and catering, a plan which made Lord Ashcroft, one of their biggest donors, into a multimillionaire. 

In 1987 Thatcher appointed John Moore as the new health and social security minister. He was the golden boy, viewed by the press as her natural successor. 

Moore made a series of speeches about ramping up NHS privatisation by handing clinical services to private companies, giving tax rebates for people in private health schemes, breaking up nurses’ national pay rates and more.

Then, in 1988, Moore and Thatcher faced a series of unofficial, semi-official and official pay strikes by nurses. Fighting these at the same time as trying to increase NHS privatisation and push health cuts became a political nightmare: “Thatcher frightened of meeting the nurses,” ran one Times headline. 

Nurses made the Iron Lady look weak. The nurses’ strikes were scrappy, spontaneous and wildly popular. Thatcher tried using her personal authority to face them down by   attacking   nurses in Parliament but lost. 

Her health secretary John Moore seemed to disintegrate under the pressure. He went off sick for two months — to a private clinic. Finally Moore gave in and threw money at the nurses. 

He disappeared from the cabinet and then Parliament. Thatcher’s favourite “golden boy” has never been heard of since. Her planned successor was stopped by striking nurses. 

In 1989 Thatcher faced another extraordinary NHS action by ambulance crews over pay. First they struck. 

Then they occupied their stations and ran the ambulance service themselves with cash raised by the same networks who supported the striking miners.

Thatcher talked tough. She sent Ken Clarke to call the ambulance unions a “sick joke.” 

They sent in the army to run ambulances. Then they admitted defeat and gave ambulance staff a pay rise.

These two strikes not only won, they also put the Tories off further major privatisation of the NHS. 

It was only the subsequent Labour government that started seriously privatising hospital buildings and clinical services.

The lesson of these strikes are that occasional one-day strikes won’t win much. An escalating series of increasingly aggressive strike action is necessary. 

Another is that the two health strikes that beat Thatcher were not led from the top — they involved self-made action led from below. 

The nurses’ strikes and ambulance occupations started unofficially before they were backed by the national unions. 

Making the health strikes as bottom-up, grass-roots and home-made as possible is the clue to victory. They involved grass-roots solidarity, with money raised from — and sympathy strikes by — other workers. 

Putting as much of those ingredients into the mix is the recipe for success.

MARK PRISK MP was Tory housing minister until October 2013. Now he’s working for a landlord company that want to exploit “generation rent.” 

He is earning £18,000 a year on top of his MP’s salary as a “strategic adviser” to Essential Living, the Chicago-based company wanting to build tower blocks to rent to middle-class people who can no longer afford to buy homes in London - thanks to the housing shortage presided over by Prisk. The firm says it can only make a profit by excluding “social” tenants.

According to Essential Living, its tower block rentals represent “housing that is affordable to working professionals who fall between social housing and ownership.” 

It is targeting professionals, including those who are over 35 with young families. It is keen to exploit single parents and wants to replace small-scale buy-to-let landlords and make big profits. 

Essential Living is actively lobbying the government to exclude social housing from its developments so it can guarantee profits. 

Last January the firm’s submission to the Commons local government committee said the government should “remove unnecessary planning barriers to the development of new stock for the private rented sector.” 

Its main demand was the “relaxation of S106 requirements,” the proviso which states that developers must put some affordable social housing in new buildings. 

Essential Living says it has a significantly different economic model — it wants to make profits by excluding social housing from its developments and by keeping out the working class, to exploit the middle-class renters. 

Their current proposal to build a 24-floor skyscraper in Swiss Cottage, north London,   faces a barrage of objections, not least because it offers less than Camden Council’s normal 50 per cent threshold for social housing.   

Having a former housing minister to advise them could help the firm lobby for their controversial developments.   

Prisk, meanwhile, is making money from the Tory model for housing , which is to exploit the middle class and ignore the working class altogether.