Do we really want our armed forces to act as Sunak’s scabs?

To fight for their country is one thing; to be used as a Tory party temping agency is quite another

The “winter of discontent” is about to inflict another ugly dilemma on the nation: do we really want the men and women of our armed forces to act as Sunak’s scabs? Politicised, told to cross picket lines and break lawful strike action just because ministers are too stubborn or incompetent to settle pay disputes? Drawn into partisan politics and turned into the enemy of nurses, ambulance drivers, civil servants and others by weakening their bargaining power?

It doesn’t seem an ideal way to treat the troops at a time when they too should be enjoying their Christmas break with friends and family. To fight for their country is one thing; to be used as a Tory party temping agency is quite another.

Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, is rumoured to be unhappy about the idea of our hard-pressed and denuded military being used as “free goods” to get his ministerial colleagues out of a hole of their own making; and the service chiefs are reportedly unhappy about the labour scheme, too.

The troops will obey their instructions and do their duty, and shouldn’t be blamed personally for following lawful orders. It’s hardly their fault – and they aren’t that well looked after themselves, either in service or, notoriously, after they leave it. Too often they become homeless veterans. They have no right to strike, but they don’t seem to be given much leeway as a result in their covenant with the nation.

The troops, and the rest of us, would be right to wonder if strike-breaking is the best use of their time. They might also wonder what damage will be done to the reputation of the armed forces as they emerge from a series of bitter industrial disputes in the coming weeks.

They are, after all, supposed to stand aside from politics, and command the respect and support of the people because they serve all the people, including NHS staff and trade unionists – and yes, that includes the likes of Mick Lynch. Our armed services do not belong to the Conservative Party or Rupert Murdoch.

There’s a long-standing convention that the armed forces may be used by governments in emergencies via a “Military Aid to the Civil Authorities” request to the Ministry of Defence. They’ve been used in this way by both Labour and Conservative governments, notably during strikes by firefighters.

Last year, in rather different circumstances, army drivers were being trained to drive fuel tankers to ameliorate the shortage of lorry drivers post-Brexit. In Northern Ireland they tried to help keep the peace for decades. Some of us remember their reassuring presence in the Covid vaccination centres, helping out during the plague.

Yet the convention of the army getting involved in civilian life is a very limited one, and, like all such conventions, it has to be tacitly accepted by the public as a whole. Imminent loss of life is the usual justification, which is why military personnel might find they are welcomed as temporary ambulance drivers.

The danger is that a government too stubborn and too unimaginative to do its job properly exploits His Majesty’s armed forces to a political end. That would end badly – and the service chiefs need to put their collective foot down.

Habitual recourse to the armed forces to deal with multiple, indefinite and emotionally charged public sector disputes is not really what should be happening, and it is not practicable in any case. There just aren’t enough troops these days anyway; they aren’t all trained to be paramedics, let alone railway staff; and you can’t really see them delivering cards and parcels for Christmas, jolly as that might be. For how long will soldiers be required to check passports at airports?

At the moment, the only strategy the government has to deal with the strikes is to break them by using scab labour – agency workers (recently legalised) and the troops. After that, it will attempt to pass laws that make strikes in certain sectors either unlawful or so difficult to organise that the result will be to remove, in effect, the right to withdraw one’s labour, from thousands, if not millions, of workers. All the troops will succeed in doing is to prolong the strike action, because the unions know that the MoD can’t lend its forces indefinitely. So the strikes will just drag on for longer.

Another reason why the strategy can’t work is because of the economic fundamentals behind the strikes – in the main, the labour shortage. Ministers like to brag about the lowest unemployment since 1974 and all that – well, there is an awkward flip-side to that, which is that the economy cannot function at its pre-pandemic levels because of a lack of workers.

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If the government fails to improve pay and conditions, these services will suffer a further inevitable loss of people to other, easier, better-paid work. There are about 100,000 vacancies in the NHS, and about the same number in the social care sector. The railways only function because RMT members work overtime as a matter of course.

There are insufficient ambulance crews because of underfunding in the face of rising demand, and because some have left for other work in the private sector. Ironically enough, Grant Shapps, when he was transport secretary last year, sent letters to ambulance drivers, among other groups, urging them to retrain as lorry drivers to help fix the chronic shortage when supply chains collapsed under the pressure of post-Covid and post-Brexit disruption.

The paramedics were told that the HGV sector offered “attractive pay rates” as well as “flexible working, fixed hours, fixed days, full-time and part-time” employment.

The simple fact is that, unless the government wants to abuse the goodwill felt towards the army, RAF and Royal Navy (and wants to have to rely on them to break strikes on a routine basis), it will have to manage its personnel issues better – and think about how to solve the labour shortage.

But it won’t, because it’s much easier to ask Ben Wallace to pony up some squaddies, hardly lavishly paid themselves, to give up their leave to drive ambulances. A government that has sunk to such moral depths doesn’t deserve to be in office.