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.
