Analysis
Sunak tries to remain above fray as public sector
strikes continue
Heather
Stewart
PM likely to find it increasingly difficult to stay
out of debate as industrial action escalates
Rishi Sunak
has largely chosen to stay out of the public debate over industrial action.
Tue 31 Jan
2023 15.00 GMT
As teachers
prepare to join the latest wave of industrial action battering Rishi Sunak’s
government this week, there is little sign of either side backing down.
Teachers in
England and Wales will strike on Wednesday, alongside university staff, train
drivers and 100,000 civil servants across scores of separate workplaces.
Nurses and
ambulance workers will follow next week in an unprecedented joint stoppage,
raising the stakes in their long-running dispute yet higher.
“People are
adding it to a long list of ‘things wrong with the country’,” says James
Johnson, of the pollsters JL Partners.
Sunak’s
strategy appears to be to hold firm, perhaps in the hope that public support
falls away, helping to squeeze striking workers into settling for minor
concessions.
Ministers
hope they can confine these to the coming year’s pay round, after Jeremy Hunt’s
March budget. No 10 has suggested any pay rise above about 3.5% would have to
come with improvements to “productivity and efficiency”.
But union
leaders have continued to insist their members need more money now, to help
them cope with double-digit inflation and start to reverse years of real-terms
cuts.
“Good
leaders are good listeners, something that seems to be beyond this government,”
says Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB. “Ambulance workers and NHS staff
have been telling ministers that our health service is in crisis because it
can’t recruit and retain the people it needs. The starting point is to talk pay
now.”
One Labour
frontbencher suggested the government might be hoping the teachers’ strikes,
which kicked off in England and Wales this week and have been running in
Scotland for some time, have enough impact on the public’s lives to undermine
any sympathy they might have.
“They’re
obviously holding out for the teachers, because that tends to be the least
popular of any strike. I think they are absolutely counting on that as being
the tipping point,” they said, suggesting this was a misreading of the public
mood.
Recent
polling by Ipsos put support for teachers’ strikes at 41%, with 33% opposed.
Public support for the nurses’ strikes waned significantly, from 59% in
November to 45% this month, as the dispute drags on. But that still outweighed
the 30% of those surveyed who were against.
And,
crucially for any hopes ministers may have of winning the PR battle, when asked
whom they blamed for the strikes continuing, 57% said the government.
Luke Tryl,
of the thinktank More in Common, which carries out focus groups (including for
the Guardian) says: “Part of the reason the government strategy of ‘stick it to
the unions’ isn’t working, is that people’s approval of the government is so
low, that their general inclination is not to take the government’s side on the
issue.”
Union
insiders believe it has also helped their cause that many of the current crop
of general secretaries are some distance from the stereotype of the “union
baron” – not least because they are women.
Christina
McAnea of Unison, Pat Cullen of the Royal College of Nursing and Sharon Graham
of Unite have repeatedly stressed the parlous state of public services, as well
as the demands of their cash-strapped, burnt-out members.
The
University and College Union’s Jo Grady is a 38-year-old academic, whose
specialist subject is trade unions and pension disputes. As a collective, they
hardly give the impression of being shadowy union fat cats.
“We all
know that the last 13 years have taken the NHS to breaking point,” Graham says.
‘“We have over 130,000 unfilled vacancies and more people are leaving every
day. So the strikes have huge public support because the public understands
that these workers who came out in the pandemic are fighting not only for
better pay but also to save the NHS from this act of national self-harm being
perpetuated by the government.”
Some
cabinet ministers have appeared more hardline than others in recent weeks.
The
transport secretary, Mark Harper, has allowed the Rail Delivery Group to make a
fresh offer in the long-running rail dispute, which is currently being
considered by the RMT.
That marked
a sharp contrast to his predecessor the keenly political Grant Shapps, who
declined to meet with rail unions.
The health
secretary, Steve Barclay, has appeared to flip-flop between an amenable “my
door is open” approach, to a much more accusatory tone, warning that striking
ambulance workers had “made a conscious choice to inflict harm on patients”,
for example. Reports that he was preparing to offer a one-off hardship payment
to unblock the talks earlier this month were quickly denied.
Unison’s
head of health, Sara Gorton, who has been involved in the negotiations, says:
“It looked like the tide had begun to turn with some ministers finally prepared
to talk about pay. But now it feels as if the government’s digging in, and
strikes are set to escalate.”
At the same
time, the government is pressing ahead with its minimum service levels bill.
Aimed at blunting future strikes, the unions see the controversial legislation
as a declaration of war. Keir Starmer has said a Labour government would repeal
it.
I have
never seen an abdication of leadership like this in all my days
Some
Conservative MPs, including the former party chair Jake Berry, have dared to
suggest the £1,400 across-the-board offer for nursing staff is “too low” and
should be increased.
But Hunt
has stuck carefully to the line that he cannot revisit this year’s pay deals,
for fear of unleashing a fresh round of inflation.
A Treasury
source says: “We’ve already been clear that we’re not reopening this year’s pay
process. We’re going to keep saying that, because it’s not changing.
“We don’t
want to do anything that risks embedding high prices into our economy for any
longer than is necessary.”
Kate Bell,
the TUC’s deputy general secretary, argues that the Treasury’s stance makes
little economic sense.
“Of course
we’ve had a high inflationary environment, but I think everyone is pretty aware
that it’s come from external factors, not internal pay pressure,” she says.
“We’re now facing a very real threat of a recession, and government’s key
message seems to be, ‘We’d like to hold down the pay of public sector
workers.’”
She adds
that private sector pay growth has been running at more than twice the rate of
the public sector (7.1% in the latest official data, against 3.3% for public
sector workers). A number of industrial disputes in the private sector –
between the Communication Workers Union and call centre workers at BT, for
example – have been settled with additional pay increases.
Sunak,
whose leadership has been in the spotlight over sleaze, has largely chosen to
stay out of the public debate over industrial action, aside from repeatedly
describing the government’s approach as “reasonable”.
Graham
says: “If any private sector strike was at the stage of the NHS dispute the
chief executive would be in the room negotiating. Rishi Sunak is effectively
the government’s chief executive and should be leading the negotiations.
Instead he is posted missing.
“I have
never seen an abdication of leadership like this in all my days.”
With more
strike days planned across the NHS – including a simultaneous stoppage by
nurses and ambulance workers next week – it seems unlikely Sunak will be able
to remain above the fray for much longer.
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