‘HOW low can a government stoop?’ Royal College of Nursing (RCN) leader Pat Cullen asked yesterday in response to Tory Health Secretary Stephen Barclay’s ‘blatant threat’ to end the career of striking nurses.
Barclay announced last Friday that the employers are taking out a case in the High Court to outlaw the RCN’s 48-hour strike from 30th April to 2nd May and then he claimed at the weekend that if nurses do go on strike they would be in breach of their code of conduct and could be struck off.
Cullen responded: ‘For Steve Barclay to come out yesterday and say that he was doing this to protect the registration of nurses, well you can see how nurses interpret that.
‘That was a blatant threat to our nursing staff, to say: “If you don’t stop this and accept my pay offer then your registration perhaps may be at risk.”
‘What they are doing is dragging our nursing staff through a court room, and treating them as criminals,’ said Cullen.
‘I find this not just cruel but totally unacceptable – how low can a government stoop?’
NHS Employers wrote a letter to Barclay last Friday announcing that it is going to the High Court and claiming that the RCN strike ballot closed at midday on 2 November 2022, meaning that action on 2 May – the last day of the planned strike – would not be covered by the strike mandate.
In his letter to Barclay, NHS Employers’ Danny Mortimer said: ‘The advice that we have received makes clear it is highly likely that if the notices for industrial actions are incorrect in one respect, then they are incorrect in total and that the strike action for the entire period of 30th April to 2nd May is illegal.’
Cullen responded: ‘If the court finds against us, then we will absolutely work within the parameters of the law. We will never do anything illegal.
‘Nurses don’t work like that and I’m a nurse myself. But if nursing is defeated then it is, in my mind, and in our nurses’ minds, an even darker day for this government.’
