Would Labour really tackle the strikes better than the Tories?

The debate about NHS strikes is turning into one of those ‘am I being unreasonable?’ threads on Reddit and Mumsnet, where posters jump all over each other to point out the way someone has messed up in a relationship.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay is still hoping to win the war of attrition between the government and healthcare workers by appealing to the unions to be reasonable and constructive. Barclay made that argument again today when taking departmental questions in the Commons, but his announcement last night that he would be taking the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to court in a bid to stop that union’s strikes showed that it is becoming harder, not easier, to stick to this line of attack.

The RCN had been one of the reasonable unions in these disputes, with Barclay and others in government using them as an example that more recalcitrant organisations like the British Medical Association (BMA) should copy. Today, Barclay reminded the Commons that the RCN ‘recommended the deal’ to its members, but had to move swiftly on to the support of Unison, the one trade union currently backing the pay offer. 

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting attacked Barclay over the impact on individual patients of the strikes:

‘A 13-year-old girl who has already waited more than a year for spinal surgery has seen her operation cancelled twice because of the Government’s failure to negotiate an end to the junior doctors’ strike. Why on earth is the Secretary of State still refusing to sit down and negotiate with junior doctors?’ 

Barclay reminded Streeting that he too thought the ‘demands of the British Medical Association are unaffordable and unrealistic at 35 per cent’, but added that ‘the House saw that in our negotiation with the Agenda for Change staff unions we had meaningful, constructive engagement’.

Streeting pushed him again, claiming the minister was refusing to sit down with the BMA and that he was wrong to say the union wasn’t budging:

‘He says that he cannot negotiate because the BMA will not budge on 35 per cent, but that is not true, is it? He says that the junior doctors have to drop their preconditions; they do not have any, do they? And he says that strike action will have to be called off before he can sit down; there are no strike days planned, are there? So is it not the case that he is quite happy to see hundreds of thousands of operations cancelled so that he can blame the junior doctors for the NHS waiting lists rather than 13 years of staggering Conservative incompetence?’ 

Neither side is being particularly reasonable in the strikes disputes. Labour’s argument about how it would be more reasonable isn’t much more convincing than the sort of ‘I would have handled this better’ superiority offered by someone posting in an online forum.

Streeting also wanted to talk about his plan for primary care reform, which he has been focusing on recently, and which is starting to take a more, well, reasonable shape than his previous attempts which just wound up the (never fully reasonable) BMA too. At least on that there is a sense of direction, rather than just ‘this wouldn’t happen because Labour would do it better’, which still forms far too much of the Labour argument across the board.