Health service staff are angry for two reasons — the coalition government refusal to implement an independent pay inquiry recommendation and its insistence on lying abut it.

Ministers claim that all NHS staff will receive a 1 per cent pay rise when 60 per cent of the workforce in England will get nothing.

NHS workers in Wales and Scotland didn’t take part in yesterday’s four-hour strikes because devolved administrations in Cardiff and Edinburgh have come to agreements with the health unions.

The Labour government in Wales and its Scottish nationalist equivalent in Edinburgh decided to meet the cost of the NHS Pay Review Body award even though the conservative coalition in Westminster refuses to meet its financial responsibilities.

In fact, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt insists that he would be “forced” to drive through 10,000 front-line job cuts if he honours the review body decision.

The only force agitating for mass redundancies comes from inside the government, which is intent on starving the NHS of investment while handing over billions of pounds of service contracts to its friends in the private health provision companies.

The workers, their unions and the public are united in support of a fully funded, publicly owned and operated NHS in which staff are fairly treated.

HIH

The SNP government has agreed to pay the pay body’s 1 per cent across the board for all staff in Scotland and given a commitment that no staff will be paid less than the Scottish living wage.

Labour’s offer of a £187 lump sum, a 1 per cent pay increase in April 2015, over and above any incremental rises, and agreement to a living wage of £7.85 an hour from January for all staff was accepted by unions in Wales.

Both governments could have misrepresented the NHS Pay Review Body recommendation as unaffordable without job losses, as the conservative coalition in Westminster did.

The difference is that, unlike the Tory-Liberal Democrat unholy alliance, they are opposed to the NHS suffering death by a thousand cuts.

The 1 per cent is certainly no king’s ransom, especially following four or five years of government-imposed pay freezes that have greatly reduced the living standards of NHS workers.

But it gives health staff a breather and encourages them to believe that their efforts are appreciated.

The conservative coalition’s hard-faced attitude to dedicated public-service staff provides another compelling reason for kicking out this bankers’ government and its austerity agenda in next May’s general election.

Wrecking antics

The Good Friday Agreement, bringing together political forces from Britain, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, wrote a fresh page in relations between the peoples of these islands.

It drew a line under three-quarters of a century of an Orange statelet founded in discrimination and gerry­mandering and opened the way to a new basis for co-operation.

The British state, which had underwritten Northern Ireland since its formation, ignoring the enormity of its sectarianism, accepted the need for change in light of an unwinnable war and a new international situation.

However, people in the north of Ireland are still waiting for the much-vaunted peace dividend, being starved of vital investment by Westminster.

Making the benefits of the agreement more tangible is essential to undermine the wrecking antics of the influential minority of politicians determined to live in the past and to threaten the people of Northern Ireland with a return to it.