John Bercow has called for the Conservatives to bow down to the pay demands of striking teachers and nurses.
The former House of Commons speaker, who was elected as the Tory MP for Buckingham in 1997, said he firmly opposed strike action in the ’70s, but has changed his mind since.
Writing in the Mirror, he said:
“I was 16 and an avid Daily Express reader. Horrified by the public sector chaos, I became a Conservative and remained so for decades.
“Today I support 100 per cent the strikers fighting to protect themselves against a Conservative Government hell-bent on cutting their pay.”
Citing the valiant work of nurses and doctors during the pandemic, Bercow called the government out for “stomach-turning hypocrisy”, saying they clapped on the streets before leaving them high and dry.
Teachers, similarly, have a right to be aggrieved.
“Rishi Sunak, with eye-watering naivete, talks of requiring students to study maths until they turn 18 when there is already a chronic shortage of maths teachers thanks to his short-sighted, mean-spirited and tight-fisted Government,” Bercow said.
“We all know of stories of teachers, as of nurses, who skip meals to make ends meet or have to turn to food banks to survive.
“In one of the richest countries in the world, it is an abomination that Conservative Ministers preside over this mess without a hint of embarrassment, let alone an apology.”
Royal College of Nursing (RCN) members working in the NHS in England at workplaces with a strike mandate are preparing to take industrial action from 8pm or the start of the night shift on April 30 until 8pm or the start of the night shift on May 2.
RCN general secretary Pat Cullen hit out at Health and Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay after NHS Employers wrote to him asking to check the legality of the action because the strike mandate runs out in early May.
Mr Barclay said he had “no choice” but to take action, believing the strikes would put patient safety and the professional registration of nurses “at risk”.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Ms Cullen said: “We have managed six months of industrial action and we have done that in the most safe and effective way.
“We will certainly not put our members at risk, we certainly won’t put our patients at risk.
“But 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 interpreted 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’.
“We will never put our nurses at risk and we certainly won’t put their registration at risk.”
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