If Tories want a war with NHS unions they need a smarter general than Steve Barclay

The health seceretary’s hostile approach is unwise, says Sean O’Grady

Steve Barclay is schooled by Sarah Pinnington-Auld and her three-year-old daughter, Lucy, who is suffering from cystic fibrosis (PA)

In politics, you should pick your battles carefully. If you are an unpopular government with no apparent purpose to your existence, you probably don’t want to go to war with the group of workers held in almost universally high esteem by the general public. And if you do pick a battle, you need a smart general.

Enter the health secretary, Steve Barclay, who is fronting the government’s campaign to beat nurses and paramedics into submission. He is not making a tremendously good job of it, even allowing for the affection commanded by the nation’s carers versus the contempt in which Tory ministers are usually held.

Barclay, along with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, repeats the same messages about NHS pay claims, arguing that they’re “unaffordable”, inflationary and divert funds from the “front line” (despite the fact that you can’t really get much more “front line” than an ambulance crew arriving at the scene of an accident). Worse than that, the government refuses to talk to the unions about pay, pointing out that the independent NHS pay review body has already made its recommendations. Again, the public isn’t convinced and it sounds very much as if ministers are using arguments about procedure rather than substance, and hiding behind the pay review body which in any case has to work within a government remit.

To most reasonable people, talking about pay and conditions with dedicated public servants sounds like the reasonable thing to do. That accords with their own day-to-experiences when bargaining and negotiation is required. People have also not forgotten the experience of the pandemic and the stress NHS staff are under every day. They are rightly sympathetic to their cause. They are not as bothered as Sunak is about changing the pay award just because we’re nearing the end of the fiscal year. They want their NHS back and they don’t think it’s too much to ask for. They blame the government, not the nurses or even Covid for the collapse in health care.

Yet while Sunak and Hunt at least manage to sound sorry about the mess, Barclay cuts a less sympathetic figure. Indeed, he is positively unpleasant in what he has to say in public. These NHS strikes are not the industrial disputes of the 1970s and 1980s and the Royal College of Nursing is not Arthur Scargill. And that is why Barclay is not the man for this job: he’s starting to come across as a bit of a bully.

He is currently scoring about one gaffe a week but you get the feeling that, if he were in the right mood, he could easily accelerate the pace and single-handedly destroy the government’s remaining credibility. Last week he finally agreed to a meeting with the leaders of the RCN but refused to discuss wages and didn’t spend very long discussing working conditions, or anything else for that matter. General secretary Pat Cullen said the health secretary was brusque to the point of rudeness. “The government was true to its word – they would not talk to me about pay,” she said. “I needed to come out of this meeting with something serious to show nurses why they should not strike this week. Regrettably, they are not getting an extra penny.

“Ministers had too little to say and I had to speak at length about the unprecedented strength of feeling in the profession. I expressed my deep disappointment at the belligerence – they have closed their books and walked away.”

Barclay has followed this performance with an article in the Daily Telegraph that can only be described as premeditated aggression: “We now know that the NHS contingency plans will not cover all 999 calls. Ambulance unions have taken a conscious choice to inflict harm on patients,” he wrote.

Unions dispute this, pointing to local arrangements and the general obligation for those on the picket line to respond to emergency calls. Either way, Barclay’s words were inflammatory and counterproductive. On Monday, Barclay was on a photo-op visit to Kings College Hospital London and was told to his face by the mother of a sick child that NHS staff are “worked to the bone” and the government is doing “terrible damage” to families on waiting lists: “The damage that you’re doing to families like myself is terrible.”

Sunak is hardly going to fire Barclay for carrying out his policy, and it’s too much of a humiliation for all concerned to move him because he’s out of his depth – it was Sunak who appointed Barclay to this sensitive role, after all. But the pity of it is that it’s difficult to identify anyone on the Tory front bench who’d be able to turn around this presentational disaster. So Barclay will carry on playing and losing the blame game on behalf of the Conservatives, until eventually the government capitulates.