OIL exec turned Tory minister Nadhim Zahawi has some brass neck to accuse nurses and transport workers taking strike action of helping Vladimir Putin.
His comments are a sick and cynical attack on key workers forced to take industrial action because his government — which is, behind the scenes, just as responsible for the rail dispute as it is directly for that in the NHS — is trying to force down pay.
But they are predictable and they will recur. “Enemy within” rhetoric accusing working people standing up for themselves of playing into the hands of Britain’s foes are nothing new.
Combined with former health secretary Matt Hancock’s attempt to blame staff for spreading Covid through care homes, they should remind all of us that our enemy is not in Moscow but at home.
That is no endorsement of Putin, whose oligarch-based regime is presiding over exactly the same price-gouging on food and essential services we are seeing in this country, as pointed out by Russia’s opposition Communist Party.
But we might question whether Zahawi — whose net worth has been estimated at £100 million, who earned £1.3m from a Kurdish oil company while a sitting MP and who opposed windfall taxes on obscenely profitable oil and gas giants earlier this year on the grounds that they were “struggling” — is really bothered by a war that has sent energy prices into the stratosphere.
Certainly he has trouble putting himself in the shoes of nurses driven to strike by an insulting real-terms pay cut following a global pandemic.
This Conservative government is responsible for huge numbers of unnecessary deaths during that pandemic. Hancock’s decision to release NHS patients into care homes without even testing them for Covid was a death sentence for thousands. Even his reference to staff spreading the virus through homes is an indictment of the casualised, outsourced labour model successive governments have imposed on the care sector.
Now a treatment backlog has caused NHS waiting lists to exceed seven million — yet this Conservative government is denying the health service the investment it needs and denying health workers the pay rise they deserve, which is the only way to recruit and retain staff to plug chronic shortages.
Workers who are fighting back are not just doing so for themselves. They know that without investment the National Health Service will cease to exist as we know it — as the free-at-the-point-of-use provider of universal healthcare. Already we see a surge in people paying for treatment because of the years-long wait on the NHS.
Similar motivations apply to rail workers — who are fighting government attacks on the very viability of the transport network. And postal workers, whose bosses are destroying Royal Mail in their bid to turn it into a gig-economy parcel delivery firm.
And university workers, whose workplaces have been turned into businesses where fat-cat vice-chancellors employ zero-hours lecturers to churn out courses like items on a production line. And teachers whose schools will need to choose between heating their buildings and retaining adequate staffing levels next year.
All the institutions and services that work to provide British people with a reasonable quality of life are under attack. If we are to question anyone’s patriotism it should be the gang of wreckers round the Cabinet table and not striking workers under the spotlight.
But the narrative that unity against an external enemy demands sacrificing our pay and conditions at home is an insidious one. It is shared by a Labour leadership that has assured ministers “we stand as one” on the Ukraine war and which likewise claims pay rises for NHS workers are not affordable.
The labour movement should not swallow the lie wherever it comes from. We need a united front not against any foreign power but against a British ruling class that is waging war on workers.
