No sooner has Downing Street’s most notorious bully, Dominic Raab, reluctantly quit the cabinet, than Steve Barclay decides to escalate matters. Talk about fists in velvet gloves. One minute the Health Secretary is posting emollient tweets about NHS staff working “exceptionally hard” and how he has the “utmost respect” for us; the next he’s “regretfully” announcing his intention to drag the Royal College of Nursing to the High Court to prove its next strike unlawful.
I arrive at work to find the atmosphere mutinous. The nurses in my hospital – as in every other – are exhausted, demoralised and often close to quitting. They take on gruelling extra shifts to make ends meet. They know they could earn more in the local supermarket. I look at my colleagues’ faces – so decent, so weary – and think: what a fatuous own goal, what vindictive idiocy. Who in their right mind would take nurses to court rather than persisting with diplomacy?
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