EVERYONE who cares for our NHS should stand shoulder to shoulder with the nearly half a million dedicated staff forced to take strike action today.

For four hours from 7am, members of Unison, GMB, Unite, the Royal College of Midwives, Managers in Partnership, Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association, the British Association of Occupational Therapists, PCS and Ucatt will walk out over the government’s disgraceful attempt to deny them a pay rise.

And action short of a strike will continue through the week.

There are few examples of the moral vacuum at the heart of capitalist Britain more stark than the gulf between the meagre earnings of NHS workers and the fortunes amassed by City spivs and speculators who bankroll the Conservatives and Ukip.

Six years of pay freezes and below-inflation rises demonstrate the contempt our rulers have for the people who keep our health service running.

As TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady points out, NHS staff are reluctant strikers.

This is the first national strike over pay in the health service for 32 years.

Their commitment to ensuring that no-one who needs the NHS will be harmed by industrial action means emergency services and urgent treatments will not be disrupted.

What a contrast to ministers who will not lift a finger to save threatened A&E departments and even hospitals sinking in a mire of PFI debt.

The 1 per cent pay increase proposed by the independent NHS Pay Review Body would have meant yet another real-terms cut for hundreds of thousands of hard-working staff.

But even that kick in the teeth was not vicious enough for multimillionaire Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who opted to deny any rise at all to 60 per cent of health workers.

Mr Hunt pleads poverty, claiming a government which cuts taxes for the rich and has plenty of spare change for raining bombs on the Middle East is unable to afford this paltry pay rise for the women and men who provide our most vital public service.

So much for a Tory Party that keeps bragging about how its slash-and-burn economic “strategy” has saved the nation’s finances.

It won’t wash with the workers. The Health Secretary should think long and hard about the scale of today’s co-ordinated action and offer NHS workers the pay rise they deserve.

But he won’t do so without a fight. Not because he doesn’t have the money — but because forcing down pay in the health sector serves a higher purpose in Tory eyes.

Just as in other public services such as teaching, attacks on pay and conditions are a sweetener for the private-sector vultures tearing the NHS apart.

Companies more interested in a quick buck than in maintaining a skilled and motivated workforce able to provide a high standard of patient care need rock-bottom wages in order to milk maximum profits from the NHS.

We’ve seen how Care UK in Doncaster slashed pay by up to £5,000 a year as soon as it got its grubby hands on a former NHS contract to provide social care.

That’s bogged the firm down in a protracted strike by workers determined not to see their pockets picked in this way.

The heroic resistance of the Doncaster strikers gives privateers cold feet — and a government committed to selling off services needs to reassure them by devaluing workers’ wages.

That’s why this strike is not just about the staff who are walking out today, but about the very future of our health service.

NHS workers have to win this fight, for all our sakes.