Say what you like about the billionaires currently conspiring to get even richer over lobster supper in Davos, while 800 million people across the world go to bed hungry – at least they know their worth.
The Chief Executive Officer class doesn’t bother with sub-inflation pay packages when the annual reports come in, even if their decisions have caused losses.
Instead, they award themselves industry-beating rates, knowing that when raging MPs want answers to why they earn 100 times more than their average worker, they can simply tell them “it’s the market, stupid”.
They can patronisingly reply that boardroom execs must be rewarded with multi-million pound pay and bonuses or they will simply go elsewhere. It’s the classic Thatcherite mantra. In capitalism, the market is always king. Which this Tory Cabinet, made up of millionaire Thatcherite apostles, totally agrees with. Except in the public sector. Then they believe the market, at least when it comes to paying people, is an irrelevance.
And that is why they are screwed. Because voters can see that their determination to starve public sector strikers away from the picket lines goes against their own core philosophy of obeying the market.
They see the extra work the likes of nurses, doctors and teachers are having to put in just to cover staff shortages and they know that to attract more of them we must offer better rewards.
You cannot tell NHS staff, as most Tories are, that if they don’t like the current pay offer they should leave, when they are already jumping ship in record numbers, with 133,000 unfilled vacancies across our health service.
Imagine how much more CEOs would pay themselves if there were 133,000 boardroom vacancies?
When recruitment agencies are offering nurses £40-an-hour to break the strike, almost three times what striking nurses receive, isn’t the market rate telling us something?
A friend’s daughter has finished training as a midwife but has decided, despite loving the NHS, that it’s being run into the ground, so she’s heading to Australia. How many will follow?
In teaching, secondary schools are currently 31% short of their annual graduate recruitment target.
Why would people with degrees who can get decent jobs dream of going into state education when Tories widely describe teachers as “The Blob” and treat them like the enemy within.
And if the Government wants soldiers to stand in for strikers they might struggle because last year the number of Armed Forces recruits fell by 30% and there was a 17% rise in fully-trained staff leaving.
Instead of negotiating ways to retain and attract public sector staff, this Cabinet of pygmies demonises and threatens them, as it plays to its own gallery. But the wider public sees through their game, hence pollsters claiming 60% of British people back the strikes.
This desperate Tory party, which has failed on so many levels, is foolish to believe its best chance of re-election lies in forcing workers to strike, then asking “who runs the country? The unions or us”. If Sunak plays that card he will get his Paul Smith-suited backside handed to him by voters.
Because the majority of them know that dedicated public sector workers are the backbone of this country just as they know how the market works, stupid: Treat staff appallingly and they will leave.
They also know which militants are really wrecking Britain.
