Give the Nurses a 10% Pay Rise Now
Experts say the next pandemic will hit us within 5 years, and that there are 1.7 million more viruses able to jump from wild creatures to humans.
Nurses are our “frontline of defence”, but they have a huge 48,000 shortfall. And that’s just in England.

National press stories said they went to work in tears most mornings, fearful of the hell they would have to go through. And they would go home in tears because of the high death rate, mainly of patients they had become attached to.
Nurses I spoke to said they feared for their lives, because of the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE). Nurses and doctors were dying around them.
The bin-liners they tried were not working. The masks made it difficult to breathe, but they were likely to die without them.
Even when proper PPE began to arrive, after a long delay, no-one knew how well it would work. Special masks had to be worn in Intensive Care Units (ICU’s) and they showed me the painful red patches the masks left on their faces.
Their mothers were having sleepless nights, worrying about their daughters’ survival chances. And the nurses feared taking the virus home and killing family members.
Was it any wonder they didn’t feel appreciated? The government was offering them a 1% pay rise at the time. Teachers came along and got a substantial pay rise – over three times what the nurses were offered.
A middle-aged nurse told me: “The teachers got the money. We risk our lives, and all we got was clapping. It’s not fair.
‘I love this job, but I don’t want to do it anymore,” she said tearfully.
The Tory government’s solution: offer nurses a 4% pay rise, during their current pay strike.
There is not the remotest chance in hell that a 4% pay rise will stop experienced nurses leaving the profession in droves, or bring a stampede of new recruits.
Railway workers – some of whom are on over £100.000 a year – have been offered 9%. Who are most deserving, the railway workers (who provide transport for some of us); or the nurses, who keep all of us alive in very dangerous times?
Frank McGinn, ex-senior surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, said:: ‘I could not believe it when I heard Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, claim that any pay rises for the nurses would “take money away” from frontline NHS services.” Nurses are the frontline: Mr Barclay should have been talking about the “second line”: managers, diversity consultants and others
“They are overpaid and unnecessary. Nobody would notice if they went on strike.’Those on the frontline deserve better pay and more respect, but it is those in charge of them who get all the money.”
Mr McGinn said one reason we were “40,000 “ nurses short was that ‘trainee nurses have to go to university and complete a degree, coming out with large debts and too little practical experience.”
He said NHS managers could recruit thousands of new student nurses if the old training system was revived: simply signing up suitable youngsters (and some not so young) who have what I consider the most important qualities for a nurse – compassion, dedication and enthusiasm, and then training and paying them on the job.
Mr McGinn thought the nurse’s shortfall was 40,000. It was when I started researching the exodus of nurses giving up their profession. The next time it was 47,000 and yesterday it was 48,000.
The government should be doing everything humanly possible to bring the nurses up to full strength but the shortfall is increasing rapidly, as new pandemics approach. The politicians obviously just don’t care. They are focused on things more important to them. Haggling over their pay rise, in the circumstances, is stupid and irresponsible.
So the people have been forced to take action, and have decided to insist we give the nurses an immediate 10% pay rise. It will be backdated to when they end their self-destructive strike, which is bound to lead to loss of human life. Plus we want the nurses to have a 5% rise next Christmas.
There is no such thing as government money. It’s the people’s money. We earn every penny of it, and the government just allocate it as they think fit. But we reserve the democratic right to allocate some of it, at times of national crisis, when the politicians fail to act. The Oxford Dictionary definition of democracy = ‘government by the people”.
Tory MP Craig Mackinlay said he was ‘extremely concerned” and ‘hugely disappointed” by the decision to hold a joint strike between the nurses and ambulance workers, He said “There are obvious risks to patients and it will undoubtedly lead to unexpected and unnecessary deaths.”
We ask the nurses to accept the 10% offer, plus 5% next Christmas (total 15% – almost what they asked for) and end their strike now.
Q: “What happens if the government just ignores you?”
A: “We’ll just ignore them. On Election Day. All 17.4 million of us.”