Mick Lynch: proposed anti-strike law shows government has ‘lost argument’ on pay – UK politics live

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In another interview, with PA Media, Mick Lynch, the RMT general secretary, said the government did not know how to run a railway service. He explained:

The railway service is in desperate straits.

The companies that run it and the government that oversees it have shown that they are incompetent and incapable of understanding the railway and running the railway on a daily basis.

When we are not on strike, the passengers are told, in this station and every other station, that due to shortages of staff trains aren’t running.

At the same time, they say to me at the negotiating table that they want to make thousands of your members redundant.

So, there is something desperately wrong with the way this railway is being run. But there is something desperately wrong with the way all public services are being run, and that’s why the workforce in these services are in rebellion now.

And Mick Lynch, the RMT general secretary, has also been giving interview this morning. Asked about the anti-strike legislation unveiled by the government yesterday, he said the announcement showed the government had “lost the argument” on pay. He told BBC Breakfast:

What this is a symbol of is that the government are losing the argument. They’ve lost the argument on austerity and pay, and the state of our national public services.

And instead they want to close that argument down by closing down the unions and stopping us from campaigning against poverty.

Pat McFadden, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, was doing an interview round this morning. Asked about nurses’ pay, and whether Labour would support them getting a pay rise of around 10% (see 9.19am), he said the nurses were “unlikely to get a pay rise of the size that they were asking [ie, 19%].” He added:

Usually these things are resolved at the negotiating table with not everybody getting what they wanted at the start. The problem at the moment is that kind of discussion is not taking place.

Good morning. Yesterday the government launched two initiatives to address the problem of striking Britain: on the “stick” side, it announcing plans for a far-reaching anti-strike law (although not as far reaching as it might have been if Jacob Rees-Mogg was still in charge, as Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey point out in their story), and on the “carrot” side they offered talks on next year’s pay settlement. The stick is a lot bigger and more sturdy than the carrot, but the carrot came as a surprise, and it suggests that minister are worried about the danger of being seen as unreasonable.

The unions are also keen to retain public support, and in an interview with Times’s Past Imperfect podcast Pat Cullen, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said explicitly that she would meeet the government “halfway” on the RCN’s pay demand.

The RCN has been asking for 5% above the RPI level of inflation. Calculations of RPI inflation vary over time, but the government is currently intrepreting that as a demand for a 19% pay rise. In her interview, Cullen indicated she would settle for roughly half of that. She said:

There is a rhetoric out there that says the Royal College of Nursing is unrealistic, it’s looking for something that’s totally unachievable, it’s looking for 19%.

Now I could sit here all day and tell you nurses’ pay has dropped by 20% over the last decade. Do I believe those nurses are entitled [to 19%]? Absolutely, I believe they’re entitled to 19%. But we also understand the economic climate that we’re working in.

And what I would say to Steve Barclay [the health secretary] and to the prime minister is get into a room and meet me halfway here and do the decent thing for these nurses.

In its write-up, the Times says the RCN would settle for a pay rise of around 10%.

Cullen has for weeks been urging the government to reopen talks on the pay offer and in public comments she has always accepted that, in a negotiation, the RCN would not necessarily get everything it wanted. But in the past she has not been as blunt as this about being willing to split the difference with the government.

The RCN development comes as the RMT rail union starts another 48-hour strike. My colleague Gwyn Topham has the story here.

It looks like a relatively quiet day in politics (other news is available, if stories about dysfunctional family relationships in anachronistic institutions are your thing), but Rishi Sunak is expected to be on a visit this morning. And in Scotland Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader, is giving a speech.

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