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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Politics
Mark Steel

'Forget nurses - billionaires have far more to lose after making fortune during Covid'

How DARE these nurses be so ungrateful and go on strike? We went out on all those Thursdays and clapped for them. Now, if we ask for a TINY bit in return – such as cleaning up our poo and sick and delivering our babies…

Such as putting suppositories up our backside and asking how many fingers we can see when we’ve keeled over onto a pavement after drinking 35 tequilas at a Christmas party…

Such as removing our genitals from a hair dryer without asking how they got there, and calming down a student whose swallowed a mug of mushrooms and is convinced he’s being chased by Bugs Bunny… they then complain they want to be paid as well.

The current pay offer will leave them about 7% worse off than they were. But they were hardly paid anything anyway, so they won’t notice that 7%.

A woman holds a placard as nurses and supporters gather to demonstrate outside St Thomas' hospital in Westminster on December 15 (Getty Images)

Whereas Britain’s billionaires became 20% wealthier during Covid. If they were to have their salaries cut by 7% that would be a HUGE amount, so it wouldn’t be fair to do things that way round.

But it’s not just the nurses who are being selfish. There are 50,000 vacancies for medical staff that the NHS can’t fill as the pay and conditions are so poor.

That means there are 50,000 lazy pigs who are too idle to spend all day giving people bed baths for less money than they need to live on.

We should ask the police to track down these 50,000 who are holding the country to ransom. But the trouble is the police are short of staff as well, so first we need to find the selfish gits who aren’t signing up to join them.

The country is coming to a halt because unions won’t adapt and modernise. For example, if you ask some union reps why their members won’t drive a train from London St Pancras to Nottingham, they’ll tell you it’s because they’re a union rep for hospital cleaners in Norwich.

They could attach an engine and a few coaches to a trolley, as they’re wheeling someone into the X-ray department. Then they could fill it with passengers, but they’re just not willing to be flexible.

One man who has tried to put the case for the government is Andrew Haines, chief executive of Network Rail.

He didn’t have a pay rise AT ALL last year and you don’t see him complaining.

It’s true he started with a salary of £588,000 but even so he's prepared to make that sacrifice. It’s only fair he’s paid this much, as his contribution to society is far greater than anything the nurses do.

That’s why, during the pandemic, although we pretended to clap the nurses, most of us were in private thinking about the amazing service of Andrew Haines, chief executive of Network Rail.

Apteral, without him , none of us would be where we are because we’d all be where the train would have taken us if it hadn’t been cancelled by those useless train firms.

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