Don’t bank on Barclay

HAPLESS Health Secretary Stephen Barclay should be rolling up his sleeves to find a way of avoiding two one-day nursing strikes before Christmas.

The National Health Service is precious. Yet the Conservatives running Britain seem so incompetent you have to wonder if they are deliberately provoking walkouts to invent scapegoats for their own 12 years of failure.

Nurses would be the most reluctant strikers in history, but they are being short-changed.

The fact they’ve been driven to vote for industrial action is the ultimate condemnation of this government’s disintegration.

Barclay, who has been accused of patronising nurses, must come up with answers now.

But the fear is there are some in this government who relish strikes in the NHS and are plotting to turn the public against nurses.

It’s a dangerous plan that would fail. Patients are not gullible, they know who is at fault – and it’s not our heroic nurses.

It’s Tory ministers who are the problem.