If I was an MP this is what I would have said in Parliament before recess - Bernard Ingham

Mr Speaker,

There is not a lot of Christmas spirit around this year and the House should know I have not the slightest trace of it for the public service unions with their epidemic of Christmas strikes and no doubt more to come in the New Year.

They are revolting in their hypocrisy, disgusting in their callousness and as utterly grasping as the capitalists who shower ever more pay and perks on themselves but not their staff. They are in fact betraying their noble founders.

I speak as someone who was brought up in a trade union home and was deputy NUJ father of the chapel on The Yorkshire Post and The Guardian. We had problems but did not strike. I covered or handled industrial relations during my entire working life (1948-1990).

For two years I was a strike reporter in London before becoming head of information in the Department of Employment which spent most of its time conciliating disputes into the early hours.

There I helped present Barbara Castle’s Ill-fated White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ and Robert Carr’s equally doomed Industrial Relations Act. I was moved to the new Department of Energy in 1974 in the middle of a three-day week and an international oil and gas crisis where I saw the ‘Winter of Discontent’ at close quarters until I joined Margaret Thatcher who brought a semblance of industrial order to “the sick man of Europe”.

Ending the abuse of power by the union barons roughly halved the size of the trade union movement and concentrated it in the bloated and cosseted public sector - all the better to milk the taxpayer who pays their wages and index-linked pensions.

We are entitled to ask whether this time they are seeking annihilation. It is no more than they deserve. It is testimony to their brass neck that they dare show their faces on TV.

All this is not to forget the devotion of many health workers during the pandemic. Nor do I overlook the over-staffed health bureaucracy they have to live with along with the likelihood that they will be sued over any failure of treatment, thanks to our litigiousness fostered by parasitical ambulance-chasing lawyers. But none of this can excuse striking and to hell with the weak, ill or injured or the millions on waiting lists for diagnosis and treatment with the threat of premature death hanging over them.

Assuming they have had any passing acquaintance with economics, how can junior doctors lodge a pay claim for 26 per cent and nurses for 19? Not even those avaricious railwaymen dare go that far.

I can understand them wanting to repair the ravages of inflation but what about the effect on existing inflation, our economic weakness and soaring national debt, not to mention their fellow men? They are doing themselves great harm - as if neglectful GPs had not already done enough?

All this sadly reflects the self-centred society we are becoming, allowing for the thousands of acts of kindness every day by responsible citizens. But the problem is with the so-called caring professions and public services. When they behave like this we should know the situation is serious. It is the result of 30 years of Government dither in the face of that sacred cow, the NHS.

And what are Tory MPs doing this very day? Why pressing Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak to get round a table with the nurses.

In other words, to settle regardless of the galvanising effect it would have on other strikers. The last thing you should do in the face of extortion is capitulate.

I firmly believe that the public are fed up with it all and fear we shall become ungovernable as we were in the 1970s until Mrs Thatcher came along.

So, come on Prime Minister, show us your mettle. By all means get round the table with the unions but not to settle. They should be told in no uncertain terms that they are behaving irresponsibly and that unless they change their ways and work for the community and not against it retribution will follow. Their precious right to strike will be gone with the wind. We can’t have lives put at risk through their unconstitutional pursuit of a political revolution – the replacement of a Tory Government by a Labour one they can boss around as its paymasters.

(Boos and uproar follow. I feel rewarded).