Nadine Dorries, minister of state for health, says she was “pleasantly surprised” when she discovered that NHS staff would be recommended for a 1 per cent pay rise. Ms Dorries, herself a former nurse, may mean well, but it’s fair to say that much of the nation would be shocked.
Like all the best gaffes, it was revealing, and not just because it suggests that ministers are out of touch with the lives of others and public opinion. It betrays, rather, a sense that the public sector generally is something that in a way lives off the private sector. The fact that those in other sectors of the economy, such as retail, travel and leisure, have had their pay cut, and lost their jobs, does not make any case in equity for a real-terms pay cut for nurses or anyone else who happens to work for the community as a whole.
The idea that the state cannot “afford” a bigger pay rise because it is borrowing so much is nonsense. It is plainly a matter of political choice. If a healthy economy requires NHS pay to be restrained so that tax cuts can stimulate enterprise, then by now the UK should have built one of the most dynamic economies in the world.
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