Grant Shapps deserves a bonus. He worked overtime at the Despatch Box to defend the Government’s anti-strike Bill, which, in his smooth selling, has morphed from forcing unions to guarantee minimum levels of “service” to “safety” (clever). They’re all out this week: ambulances, buses, teachers. The only people not on strike are the Royal family, which surprises me because their conditions are terrible.
The Labour backbenches were packed. I’ve not seen so many socialist MPs in one place since they threw a picket at Jurassic Park. “One minute yer clappin’ key workers,” said Ian Lavery, “the next minute yer sacking key workers”, which was funny the first time one heard it but Lefty members repeated it again and again - perhaps, said Shappsy, because their questions were pre-written for them by trade union officials (if he’s implying illiteracy, the crisis is not defined by class. Harry’s book has been released in 16 languages, and he can’t read it in any of them).
Do they not know, said the minister, that France and Spain already enforce minimal “safety” levels? Well, well, well, said Labour’s Sam Tarry, I did not realise that this “rancid government” was copying “Franco’s Spain” or “Vichy France!” It says something about the Left’s antiquarianism that they still think Europe inhabits the 1930s, but implicit in all these far-Left attacks on the Tories was a swipe at the current Labour leadership. Keir Starmer says the unions have a point but won’t endorse the strikes: Mr Tarry was sacked from the shadow front-bench for joining a picket.
New, New Labour is against everything and for nothing. Its next manifesto will consist of photos of Sir Keir having frank conversations with kittens. In the midst of this impotent ambiguity, Shappsy had great fun, complaining that he seemed to be “living rent free in Mick Lynch’s head” - and when Jeremy Corbyn rose from his tar pit to demand the Tories consider the “stress levels of workers… who’ve had 10 years of frozen pay”, Grant replied that, first, not all pay has been frozen and, second, “what about the stress levels of people who can’t get to work?” Or “what about the stress levels of people who might be waiting for an ambulance?”
“The first loyalty” of public sector workers “should be to the British taxpayer”, said Conservative Lee Anderson, who won’t be out-Northerned by Ian Lavery - and Richard Drax pointed out that when the Army was called in to replace strikers at airports, the service worked embarrassingly well. Given how much soldiers are now expected to do in the absence of civilian workers, I’m tempted to ring the local barracks to ask if they could take down the scaffolding the builders put up on my house six months ago and, for reasons best known to them, never took down.
But the best question was asked by Labour’s Rachael Maskell, who noted that hospitals were dangerously understaffed before the strikes: so why aren’t the Tories obliged to provide a minimum service?
Alas, governments have the sweetest contract of all: you can only sack ‘em once every five years.
Minimum levels of service for nurses, ambulances... and the Tories too please
The debate over strikes continues as Grant Shapps tries to defend the Government's proposed anti-strike law to much resistance