The High Court has this afternoon blocked the second day of strikes by nurses after Health Secretary Steve Barclay took legal action against the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to stop the walkouts. RCN members had planned a 48 hour strike between 8pm on 30 April and 8pm on 2 May, but today’s ruling was that the second day was unlawful as it was outside the union’s six-month mandate for industrial action.
The case is pretty curious in lots of ways. The RCN didn’t come into court and wasn’t represented because it opposes the legislation used as the grounds for Barclay’s legal challenge, the Trade Union Act 2016. In a letter to the court, the RCN said it ‘does not wish to give credence to what it fervently believes to be an unnecessary and misguided application brought by the Secretary of State’.
This court battle has been as much about sending a message to the public as it was about the legal arguments
Its general secretary Pat Cullen said after the ruling that ‘they have won their legal fight today. But what this has led to is they have lost nursing, and they’ve lost the public. They’ve taken the most trusted profession through the courts, by the least trusted people’.
That statement underlines what this long-running dispute has become all about: winning and losing trust. Ministers hope that they will win the war of attrition with the unions over pay by appearing to be the reasonable ones who made a decent pay offer and are worried about patient safety. The unions are pushing back on the basis that it will take quite a pendulum swing for the public to trust politicians more than they do the ‘NHS hero’ nurses who they applauded only a few years ago. Indeed, many nurses protesting outside the court were holding placards saying ‘who takes their heroes to court?’
This court battle has been as much about sending a message to the public as it was about the legal arguments. The judge, Mr Justice Linden, himself highlighted this when he said Cullen’s statement implied he had accepted the government’s argument and that much of it seemed to have been written for a ‘different audience’.
There was a hollow victory for both sides today: the government had demanded that the RCN pay its full legal costs of £47,885, but the judge cut this down to £35,000. Doubtless the union will doubtless use this in its campaigning. And while Barclay and NHS Employers, who asked him to take the legal action, have succeeded in stopping the second day of the strike as a result of the RCN’s lack of competence over scheduling the walkouts, they have also made it more likely that nurses will end up voting for more action later on. This war is very much not over.
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