PMQs: Starmer’s middle-road stance on strikes leaves him open to attack

Rishi Sunak has “curled up in a ball and gone into hibernation” Keir Starmer argued during Prime Minister’s Questions today. Ahead of unprecedented strike action being taken by nurses on Thursday, the Labour leader told the Prime Minister that he can avert the strike if he decides simply to “open the door and discuss pay”. Sunak claimed, in turn, that the government has “consistently” spoken to all unions involved in disputes. Showing just how careful he knows the Tories must be about this particular action, Sunak stressed the “incredible work” done by nurses and told MPs: “We will continue to back our nurses.” The Prime Minister knows that, given the special position of the NHS in the public consciousness, the government cannot smear healthcare workers in the same way it has striking workers in other sectors.

Starmer described the strikes as a “badge of shame” for the government and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Tories, telling MPs that nurses had been “forced into it because the government has broken the health system”. He told the story of a schoolboy waiting for a gallbladder operation whose mother is “desperate” for Sunak to resolve the dispute. “All he needs to do is simply meet the nurses,” Starmer repeated. The Labour leader argued that there is an “obvious solution”: scrap the non-dom tax status and use the money to invest in the NHS workforce, as Labour has pledged to do. “The reason he can’t choose nurses over non-doms is because he’s too weak to stand up to the tax avoiders,” Starmer said.

Labour’s line on the strikes had been that it is for the unions and the government to negotiate a settlement. In the past few days, however, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said that Labour would be unable to meet nurses’ calls for a pay rise of 5% above inflation if the party were in government.

The party is trying to tread a middle road on the nurses’ strikes – arguing that they are the fault of successive Conservative governments but also that the pay demands from nurses are ‘unaffordable’. This puts Starmer somewhat at odds with both supporters and opponents of the strikes and left him open to Sunak’s critique that the Labour leader’s calls for the government to “get round the table” are just a “political formula for avoiding taking a position”. The party may now have rejected the nurses’ pay demand, but it has yet to make an alternative offer, leaving the Labour leader to parrot the long-standing line about “getting round the table” – a stance which invites criticism from all sides of the debate.