The rejection of a 5.5 per cent increase by the Royal College of Nursing is “obviously disappointing” former Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth has said.
Ashworth, now head of the think tank Labour Together, told GB News: “That’s obviously disappointing. It’s obviously their right as a trade union to express their opinion in their ballots, but that’s obviously disappointing.
‘Wes Streeting is going to have to speak pretty quickly to the leader of the Royal College of Nursing.
“You’ve got to get fair pay settlements, that’s certainly true. But also we’ve got to be clear that the public finances are in a state and pay settlements should be fair, but they should be affordable.
“But now there’s a big job for both Wes Streeting and the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing to get together and see if they can get an agreement urgently, because nobody wants to see nurses go on strike again.”
Reacting to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s speech, he said: “I thought it was a very serious speech from Rachel Reeves, because she’s a very serious figure and these are indeed very serious times.
“Now, this is our first conference since we got back into government after 14 years of the Tories, but we don’t want to be triumphant here.
`’We are sobered by the realities, that the challenges facing the country are deep and we’ve got to tackle them so there are going to be tough decisions.
“What we got today from Rachel Reeves was her levelling with the British public that there are tough decisions on the road ahead, but also outlining that there is a better and brighter day that we can glimpse at, because you’re talking about breakfast clubs for kids, you’re talking about getting our economy rebuilt again so people are better off. So I think there is some hope there.”
Asked about means testing the winter fuel payment for pensioners, he said: “I’m under no illusions that that is a very, very difficult decision that the Government has made.
“They would argue that when you’ve got the sort of so-called triple lock increases in the pension, you don’t need the winter fuel payment going all the way up to the income scale, so that Richard Branson and King Charles get it. That’s the Government’s argument.
“But look, that’s a difficult decision, and there are people here at this conference who are arguing about it. They were wanting to put pressure on Rachel Reeves this week.”
He said the Prime Minister should not be overly concerned by Nigel Farage: “Keir Starmer should be spending his time focusing on fixing the country, fixing the economy, fixing the NHS, but you are right.
“I run a think tank now called Labour Together. We did a report just on Friday which showed that, yes, people have switched their vote to Labour. People used to vote Conservative, but Labour’s victory is fragile.
“What the voters were telling us is fix the economy, deal with the NHS and fix illegal migration, that’s got to be what Labour is focused on.”
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