Man in a Shed: RCN

Monday, July 16, 2007

English nurses are worth less than Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish nurses !

The normally reasonable and placid RCN is balloting on strike action. Why ? Because Nurses in England will get an effective pay rise of 1.9% ( thanks to a Brownian slight of hand giving a two stage award ) compared to the 2.5% .

The devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all given the pay rise immediately - after all they have lots of spare cash from their subsidies from the English tax payers.

The effective First Minister of England ( ~~Vidkun Quisling~~ Gordon Brown - MP for Kircaldy Scotland ) in his last and current roles has said it can't happen for England.

Can anybody spot the usual conflict of interest here ?

Also the nurses - like everyone else - should not fall for the new Gordon Brown stealth version of inflation at 2.5% - its really nearer 5% - so we're only discussing how big a pay cut English nurses deserve. ( And of course most of those who have just qualified as Nurses can't find jobs anyway - thanks to the Stalinist planning of the current Labour government.)

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman