3.  Because in the case of NHS workers, they represent over 5% of the total working population, so giving them the double digit payrises they're asking for would have a massive impact on all of us, and I'm thoroughly hacked off with the way they all bang on about how they all saved the country during Covid, when for every massively overworked intensive care nurse there were multiple others sat around twiddling their thumbs because non urgent care was cancelled, and the money would surely be better spent getting that care back on track.


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I don’t necessarily agree with all your points but you are entitled your opinion. However I must take you to task on this one as it’s simply not true that loads of NHS staff not just nurses sat ‘twiddling their thumbs’ during the pandemic. Although elective surgery and face to face outpatient work stopped the staff who usually did this were either redeployed to other areas or worked and implemented alternative methods. Also emergency care continued in the same way as before. In my hospital, most nursing staff who worked in elective surgery and outpatients were redeployed to critical care, A&E or acute wards. This applied to all other groups of clinical and non clinical staff. Remember although our critical care staff were overworked the number of critical beds tripled or more and they needed more staff. Also new techniques and treatments needed more people. Turning a proned patient in ICU takes 9 or 10 people to do it safely and effectively for example.

During the pandemic I never saw a single colleague sitting twiddling their thumbs but I did see, and experienced myself, exhausted colleagues, working longer hours than paid for, doing jobs and activities that were new to them and suffering from the stress of overwork and patients dying who really wouldn’t normally have died.  And we lost a few colleagues to the disease as well.

This all against a background of 10 years plus of underinvestment and staffing shortages.