There are two facts about
nurses and doctors with which very few would disagree. The first is that it
takes years and costs tens of thousands of pounds to train them, and the second
is that there is a critical shortage of both, with large numbers of unfilled
vacancies in the NHS. With that as context, try as I might, I really struggle
to imagine the ministerial conversations which concluded that threatening to
sack any nurse or doctor who refuses to provide a better service on strike days
than the currently-resourced NHS is able to provide on non-strike days is such
a brilliant idea that it should be made law. Of course, it wouldn’t be ministers
doing the sacking, it would be their appointees on the health boards and trusts
to whom that responsibility would be delegated but, again, I really can’t
imagine the thought process that managers in such trusts would go through which
would lead to them actually issuing any dismissal notices. Not only would it
completely poison future industrial relations, it would make their job of
meeting the myriad targets placed upon them by the various governments of the
UK even harder than the current setting of ‘impossible’.
One of the two semi-rational reasons
that I have been able to come up with is that the UK ministers seriously
believe that the deterrent effect will be so great that striking workers will
agree to meet whatever arbitrary service levels ministers will set such that
employers will never ever want to use the power which the government is seeking
to grant them. It’s certainly credible that ‘employers will never ever want to
use the power’; most of them have more sense than that. But that reluctance to
use the power bears little relationship to the question of whether the strikers
comply with the arbitrary service levels or not, and has much more to do with
the application of a little common sense. That leaves us with the idea of ‘deterrence’
as a guiding principle.
It's something on which the
current government certainly has form. The whole policy of sending a tiny
number of migrants to an African country with which they previously have no
connection was all about deterrence as well. It was supposed to destroy the
business model of people smugglers by convincing the migrants that the
consequences of getting into a small boat were worse than simply staying put.
To say that the evidence for this assertion is lacking would be a considerable
understatement. The government clearly has no conception of the degree of
desperation felt by people prepared to risk their own lives and those of their
children by getting into a small boat and crossing the channel; the idea that a
tiny risk of being sent to Rwanda would deter them tells us more about the
mindset of the ministers than that of the migrants.
To the extent that deterrence
works at all, it depends on a number of factors. Those taking the action that
is supposed to be deterred have to be taking the decision on the basis of a
careful risk analysis and weighing up the likelihood of negative consequences (rather
than acting out of desperation), and they have to really believe that those
consequences will certainly follow. In the case of NHS workers, they are as
able as anyone else to understand that employers who sack them for striking
would have to be even more insane than the ministers devising the policy.
That leaves the other
semi-rational reason, which is that the government seriously believes that restricting
the rights of working people is always, and in all circumstances, going to be a
vote winner for the Tory party. Even Thatcher realised that wasn’t true and
chose her battles carefully, but those who seek to emulate her clearly have
only a partial understanding of history. Perhaps they’re too focussed on
mathematics.
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