What has all this been for? The country has been put through seven months of NHS strikes, with the Royal College of Nursing provoked into striking for the first time ever and doctors starting another stretch on Thursday. Schools have closed and children already harmed by the pandemic have been made to suffer, the inevitable effect shown in this week’s Sats results. Rail workers have been striking on and off for over a year, just as people should be encouraged back on to trains. Every public service has been disrupted, and all for what?
A piffling sum of around £4bn is all it will cost to settle the pay demands of hard-pressed public sector staff at the rates set by the pay review bodies, the head of the IFS, Paul Johnson, tells me. That’s “money down the back of the sofa”, he says. Out of total UK public spending of around £1tn, it’s trivial – equivalent to an accounting or forecasting error. There is no plausible reason why the government put the country through the wringer, why children were harmed or why some patients will have died waiting for treatments, with hundreds of thousands more put at risk.
As Sian Elliott, TUC policy officer for public services, tells me, these pay settlements would cost the government even less. Raising pay for millions of public employees means they pay more tax – and since many are very low paid, any extra they earn will reduce their top-up from universal credit (UC). Here’s a disgraceful fact: a huge number of DWP staff are so low paid they claim UC, so while they spend their working lives handing out UC, they also swap places and go round to the other side of the desk as UC claimants.
The wonder is not that the public sector finally rose up and went on strike, but that it has been so extraordinarily patient through all the years pay fell: in real terms, senior teachers in England have lost 13%, an average of around £6,600, since 2010; senior police constables have lost 17%; and doctors, nurses, health visitors and prison officers have also lost heavily. Elliott says latest TUC calculations show that public sector workers have lost an average £260 a month in real terms compared with 2010, falling well behind private employees. Nor is raising public pay as inflationary as the Bank of England claims, as public services don’t put up the prices of their products in the same way to cover the cost.
How much is £4bn? Johnson says that’s easy to raise several times over from long overdue reforms to council tax and by making tax on unearned income from capital gains match that on PAYE earnings. Read his excellent book Follow the Money for many more such suggestions, in a country under-taxed compared with other western European nations. Johnson’s constant refrain is that everything eventually must be paid for in growth or higher taxes. But Sunak’s slippery talk of “efficiency savings” and “reprioritisation”, while claiming no cuts to frontline services, is what the Tories and their supporters in the press would slam as “magic money tree” talk if it came from Labour.
After 13 bitter years of austerity, there are no squads of imaginary “back-office pen-pushers” to be shed in bare-bones public services. Teaching unions are satisfied that their 6.5% will not be stripped out of school or further education budgets. Is it to come from capital, when thousands of schools are crumbling, some with elements at “serious risk of imminent failure”? Where is the fat in the NHS? Sunak dare not admit that the sum is small – and low-paid staff need never have lost earnings to strike for what they deserved.
Sunak mentioned only one new source of funds, and it was squalid politics: lifting the price of visas and NHS charges for immigrants by over £1bn. He seeks to placate his ultras, who call for care worker visa cuts as the Commons and Lords ping-pong over the most brutal elements of his new migration bill: it’s cheap, performative politics to deter the migrants whom he knows social care desperately needs.
Cheap politics is the cause of all these months of pointless disruption. The Tories gambled that this would be their great culture war win, but as the polling guru John Curtice told the TUC’s staff day last week, they got this “badly wrong”: the public has stayed remarkably staunch in supporting the strikers. Everyone knows someone in the public sector, and nearly everyone feels the pinch themselves. Everyone knows this 6% settlement still leaves public pay lagging behind the 8.7% inflation rate.
This is another mighty defeat for the government, on the same day as other bad news: GDP figures showed the economy shrinking again, and the Office for Budget Responsibility issued a grim warning that stubbornly high inflation and soaring borrowing costs add billions of pounds to the government’s debt interest. Also on Thursday, the latest NHS waiting list figures showed another leap upwards, to 7.47m.
On this day, too, the unions won an important battle, as the high court struck down Sunak’s anti-union law permitting agencies to provide scab workers to cover for strikers: it amounted to making strikes impossible, said the court. We wait to see if all the unions fall in behind the teachers, as Sunak declares this pay offer is final, however long some may stay on strike. But the government’s dithering and U-turning throughout may make that threat look hollow.
Labour’s employment policy, with fair pay agreements across every sector, would bring a measure of industrial peace and more voice to the unions. When they are for the first time given freedom to enter any workplace to recruit, the likes of Amazon, where workers have walked out again this week, will find the balance of power shifting between workforce and employer. Sunak’s party flounders yet again, deaf to the mood of the times.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
