Pay deals must come with service reforms
Britain faces a grim winter of strikes, beginning this week with an action by the RMT that will bring a great deal of the country to a halt – hurting business, ruining holidays, imperilling health.
The action is unconscionable. A decent pay offer is on the table; it has been rejected for ideological reasons, because the union obviously thinks it can use the Christmas misery to exact further concessions, and because the militants are opposed to modernisation. As Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, writes in these pages, the current railway model is “untenable”, with a revenue gap running up to £175million a month that is being subsidised by taxpayers, some of whom do not even use the service.
The Government is right to tie any pay deal to reform, though its high-minded approach leaves it in the unenviable position of trying to choreograph a sound settlement without either negotiating directly in a “beer and sandwiches” campaign or openly going to war against organised labour.
If there were just one dispute at stake, a softlysoftly strategy might be popular in its appeal to reason and national interest. But we also face action among civil servants, mail workers and, most troublingly, nurses and ambulance workers – threatening to delay thousands of operations. The Tories, of course, want to resolve all such disputes as soon as possible, but a few MPS might calculate that if strikes do go ahead, it will hurt Labour more than the Conservatives, for it is the Left that is allied to the unions.
Hitherto, this has been possible: Labour has struggled to cook up a coherent line on unions, falling back on demanding more talks (which implies giving in). But over the weekend, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, suggested a new course by indicating that the nurses’ initial pay demand would be too much even for Labour – and that any new money would have to be tied to reforms that benefit patients.
This suggests a key internal victory for the Progressive wing of his party, the neo-blairites now sending signals – if not yet coherent policies – that they will not blow up the economy if elected.
Given the immense Labour poll lead, given the misery coming down the track, the Tories have nothing to lose: they must give teeth to Mr Harper’s strategy by pushing forward dramatically with legislation to guarantee the provision of minimum service levels.