JUNIOR doctors ended their longest walkout in NHS history today — and are balloting to extend their strike mandate.
Consultants walk out from tomorrow. Doctors’ core demand — that if ministers cannot offer a raise that restores years of lost earnings, they should indicate they have a road map to doing so — is relevant to every union.
That is true whether or not they recommend acceptance of below-inflation offers. As the National Education Union general secretary-elect Daniel Kebede put it on the offer being put to teachers: “Whichever way the vote goes, the fight for pay restoration is not over.”
If the strike wave is to live up to its promise, it cannot simply slow down the long-term decline in working-class incomes but must begin to reverse it.
An individual below-inflation settlement is not necessarily a defeat. But if we look back in five years and find the downward trajectory on pay has continued, then the strike wave has failed.
In the public sector at least, such a medium-term vision has to include assessment of how politicians plan to raise pay. The Tories, as the British Medical Association points out, have not indicated that any such plan exists.
What’s Labour’s position? The opposition is more emphatic about what it will not do than what it will, but the messaging from Keir Starmer is that economic growth will deliver higher wages.
His words to the now disgraced Confederation of British Industry in 2021 remain the lodestar: “When business profits, we all do.”
This is not true. It is transparently untrue in a period where energy and food giants are posting record-breaking profits, but ordinary people’s incomes are falling.
Besides having no plan for growing wages except as a by-product of economic growth (Starmer, we should recall, refused even to commit to the 6.5 per cent uplift for teachers that Rishi Sunak has since conceded), it is not clear whether Labour has a plan for economic growth.
Bank of England officials are frank that their interest rate rises may provoke recession, but see this as a welcome means of lowering inflation. Labour refuses to criticise the interest rate rises, indicating it too would allow the bank to unleash a recession.
Starmer insists that the Tories have wrecked the economy, but his prescription for government is to repeat the policies of the last 13 years, squeezing services and pay on the basis of balancing the books. Why this should boost the economy any more than it did under the Tories he does not say.
This is the context in which North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll has announced he will run as an independent. Driscoll’s letter to the Labour leader makes the exact point: that Starmer says “Britain is broken, and then [claims] things are now so difficult we will abandon any plan to fix it.”
Speaking to the Morning Star earlier this month, Driscoll noted that a “cost has to be imposed” on the current Labour leadership’s behaviour.
The whole labour movement has a stake in this. Delivering for union members means changing Labour policy on pay and public services.
Most unions have strong policy on what they want to see — inflation-proofed pay awards, higher investment, an end to outsourcing and privatisation — but limited means of imposing this on an undemocratic Labour Party that assumes it can ride into office on the back of Tory failings.
Demonstrating that Labour’s non-offer has an electoral cost would help raise this pressure. Affiliated unions cannot endorse a non-Labour candidate without expulsion: but they may indicate their anger by declining to campaign for London Labour’s appointee in north-east England, as no doubt will many Labour members in the region.
Driscoll’s candidacy has the potential to upset Starmer’s calculations on a national basis. Many trade unionists will surely see that as an opportunity.
