The long-term English patient – ​​the strikes are dangerous for Prime Minister Sunak

Rishi Sunak

The British prime minister has promised his compatriots to significantly reduce the endless waiting lists for patients.

(Photo: Reuters)

London. Things have been looking up for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak so far. After almost six months in office, the Tory leader has not only allowed the economic chaos of his predecessor Liz Truss to be forgotten, but has got his politically suicidal party under control and has even settled the ongoing dispute over Northern Ireland with the EU.

Sunak has also narrowed the gap between his ruling Conservatives and the opposition Labor Party in opinion polls from over 25 to just 14 percentage points. The prime minister could therefore look forward to the local elections on May 4th, which are seen as a kind of dress rehearsal for next year’s parliamentary elections.

Now, however, renewed cracks are appearing in the political stability, of which Sunak is so proud: the nationwide mass strikes, which the prime minister believed to be over with a mixture of carrot and sitting out, have caught up with him.

Just under a year ago it was the railway workers with their brawny union leader Mick Lynch who triggered the wave of strikes, but now it’s the sympathetic nurses with their royal professional association who want to stay on the barricades and have rejected the government’s wage offer as insufficient.

However, wage demands of 19 and even 35 per cent for nurses and junior doctors seem illusory even when one considers that the inflation rate in Great Britain has been around 10 per cent for almost a year. The fact that economic growth came to a standstill at the same time has intensified the struggle for distribution and now makes a solution all the more difficult.

Crisis in the healthcare system is making the economy sick

The majority of the British still support the labor disputes of nurses and doctors – despite the enormous bottlenecks in the state health system NHS. This makes the wave of strikes politically dangerous for Sunak. At the beginning of the year he promised his compatriots that he would significantly reduce the endlessly long patient waiting lists.

The strikes are pushing the already ambitious goal a long way off. So there is much to suggest that the Conservatives will get the next lesson in the municipal ballot and could lose more than 500 mandates, as they did last year.

The receipt would be well deserved. Like his conservative predecessors, Sunak has so far failed to present a coherent growth strategy for Great Britain. The ailing NHS health system is a good example of this: the longer the industrial dispute lasts there, the longer the waiting lists and the more Britons are turning away from the labor market due to poor health.

This is a fatal development for a country that has caused a shortage of skilled workers due to Brexit.

More: The great Brexit neurosis: See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing

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