ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS : THE UK GOVERNMENT’S RUBBER GLOVE, Matt “those men who died on the beaches” Hancock is expected to make a bold and bankable promise to the UK’s nurses today.
“Not just nurses,” a ‘source’ inside both Downing Street and the Dept for Voluntary Causes of Death told LCD Views, “porters, doctor chaps, cleaners, well, the whole raft really. They can all expect a pay rise.”
The pay rise can be sourced immediately “should they choose to quit the NHS and go and work for a private contractor”, or, the pay rise can be “jam tomorrow if they choose not to enrich our chums who own companies that supply NHS staff by contract.”
The position, described as “balanced” by industry lobbyists, is intended to both offer nurses encouragement as they “wage war” against Covid-19 in bin bags and face masks bought at Homebase (other DIY and trade outfits are accessible), but not “unfairly undercut the free market in health provision within the national health service”.
But there was a note of caution.
Recently the Health Secretary Matt Hancock did sagely say “now is not the time to discuss a pay rise” for nurses. Presumably because right now public sympathy for the profession is politically just too high and it is currently “untenable for a laugh in Parliament when we vote to reject the pay rise”.
How much the nurses, and associated professions, can expect to be gifted after “the dust has settled in the trenches” isn’t yet clear. But it will presumably be a “lower percentage than the annual MP salary increase and less than can be earned working for a private contractor”.
“Of course they won’t all get the pay rise,” the source adds, “your government spent January organising a commemorative Brexit 50p and not readying supplies of PPE, this means that not all will survive. But we will effusively thank them for their sacrifice. We’re so steeped in the myths of wars we didn’t personally fight in, it’s incapable to see this as a public health emergency. And in wars you sacrifice troops for victory.”