David Harding-Price

By David Harding-Price davidhardingprice

The first is in a fairly modern hospital as a staff nurse caring for people after their operation. The shifts are twelve and half hours long, three days a week, but you may have to do an extra day, which you may be paid. There is a restaurant, but we cannot guarantee you will get time to use it. The salary is £11.09 an hour. Away from work, there is beautiful countryside, ancient history to explore going back centuries, Manchester United is only two hours away if you can get a ticket and it rains often.

The second is in a state of the art hospital as a staff nurse caring for people after their operation. The shifts are twelve and half hours long, three days a week, but you may have to do an extra day for which you will be paid. There is a restaurant, with subsidised food for you to use on your meal breaks, which you will get. The salary is £17.90 an hour. Away from work there is beautiful countryside, ancient history to explore going back two centuries, Disney World is only two hours away you can get a ticket and it rarely rains.

Now tell me which job would you go for – be honest? Of course the second one. The only catch is it is in the United States of America.

Nurses are facing this dilemma on a regular basis. Offers of posts abroad are coming in thick and fast and this government continues to deem it acceptable to abuse the goodwill of the nursing profession. As a result more and more nurses will head off for the second job and sunshine. Not just America but other countries as well, Australia is offering similar jobs with flight paid for starting at £27,373 – almost six thousand more than a nurse gets starting in Lincoln.

The government has said that there is to be a 1% public sector pay ceiling, just after the MPs gave themselves 11%. For nurses that means four more years of in reality pay cuts. We have seen our pay differential drop by 12% since 2010. With inflation at 1.5% a 1% pay ceiling means a further 2% cut in the next four years.

At the RCN Congress in June it was pointed out that a newly qualified graduate working at Lidl could earn over £38,000. A newly qualified nurse with a degree can expect a stating salary of £21,692, barely £2 an hour above the governments much heralded living wage.

I struggle to understand how our Members of Parliament live with their consciences when they take 11% pay rise but are happy for nurses to be using food banks and relying on charity to live day to day.

The nursing profession has provided 24 hour, 7 day a week, 52 weeks of the year care since the inception of the NHS in 1948. Without nurses, the NHS would have died years ago. We are now at the point where unless the government starts to care for nurses, the shortfall of 200 nurses in ULHT will become 300. Many of the students qualifying in September are going to be tempted with the second offer above and similar ones. They are not tied to Lincolnshire and a nursing degree makes the world their oyster.

If you want a nurse to be there at the weekend or at night when your mum or dad is so confused they do not know what to do or when your child has had an accident and is bleeding from a limb I am asking you to start telling your MP it is time that nurses are rewarded for the work they do and not just taken for granted.
3% for the next four years is not a lot compared to what the Labour government gave the banks in 2007/2008. It would bring nurses almost back to the point they were at in 2010.

My challenge to all of you is to ask your MP why it is acceptable for them to have 11% and nurses to only have 1%. Please e-mail their replies to me at [email protected]. On behalf of all the nurses, thank you.

David is a retired NHS nurse, but is currently the Royal College of Nursing’s Council Member for the East Midlands and is Honorary Treasurer of the RCN. David was also a Lib Dem MP candidate for Lincoln in the past. He has two grown up children and enjoys photography and swimming in his spare time.

By David Harding-Price davidhardingprice

Election night was a disaster for the Liberal Democrats, not only here in Lincoln but across the whole country. The electorate decided to punish them for the past five years and yet they rewarded their coalition partners the Conservatives. Why was this? Time alone may bring answers.

The Liberal Democrats were not the only party to suffer. Labour expecting to form at least a coalition with another party also failed to make headway and lost seats due to the SNP’s almost total domination of Scotland.

Here in Lincoln, Lucy Rigby was expecting to become the next MP, not see the incumbent increase his majority. I congratulate him on doing that.

The Greens had hoped to take a couple of additional seats but only managed to retain their sole seat in Brighton. UKIP, who many thought would have a number of MPs including Boston and Skegness and the Great Grimsby seats, ended up with a 50% reduction in the House of Commons. Across the county (Humber to the Wash) no seats changed hands. Whilst we saw new incumbents in Great Grimsby, Louth & Horncastle and Boston & Skegness, the parties holding the seats remained the same, Labour having two and Conservatives nine.

There are some who are already asking how any party can claim to govern when they only have 39% of the votes cast, but that is the democratic system we live with at present. It’s time that we had a system that represents the whole country and not just a small percentage of the country. The Conservatives will now govern having had only approximately 25% of the potential electorate supporting them. However, their bigger worry has to be firebrand backbenchers who will know they can demand things from David Cameron and get them because he needs their vote to maintain his slim majority.

If we consider the local election results, it appears a number of councils have seen the Conservatives increase their number of seats. Bucking that trend was Lincoln, where Labour took a seat from the Tories in Birchwood Ward. Whilst in Boston UKIP gained 13 seats, the same number as the Conservatives, with Labour and Independents gaining two each. The question now has to be who will form the administration? Will the Tories link up with Labour and the independents to keep UKIP out, or will UKIP persuade the independents and Labour to work with them? The latter is unlikely and the Tories and Labour working together at local level has history in the north of the county.

In North East Lincolnshire Labour and UKIP each gained a council seat at the expenses of the independent candidate. The council remains in no overall control, with Labour the largest party. A coalition with the Liberal Democrats would appear the most likely outcome there. In North Lincolnshire the Conservatives were defending a majority of 3 in the seventeen ward and retained control of the council with an increased majority.

In North Kesteven the Conservatives remain in control of the Council with 28 of the 43 seats. Various independent candidates hold the rest, including those who were previously Liberal Democrats. In South Kesteven all the seats were up for election and the result left the Conservatives in control with a clear majority. In East Lindsey, again, all the seats were up and the Conservatives took 35 giving them control from a council that was no overall control. In West Lindsey the 37 seats breakdown as Conservatives 21, Liberal Democrats 11, Independents 3, Labour 2 giving the Conservatives a majority of five.

Nationally, now having lost the shackles of the Liberal Democrats, the Tories are in a position to follow their right leaning policies. It is expected the Human Rights Act will be repealed and the police will gain greater powers to intercept personal internet and telephone communication. The £12 billion cuts in benefits will hit those who probably need it most. The bedroom tax and tuition fees originally devised by Labour will probably rise. It is unlikely that the 56 SNP MPs will have much power in that whilst Cameron has a majority they will be able to jump up and down and shout but have no clout.

We can see the first signs of things to come with David Cameron announcing his first cabinet ministers. George Osborne, Ian Duncan Smith, Theresa May and Nicky Morgan remain in their posts with Phillip Hammond becoming Foreign Secretary, Michael Fallon gets Defence and Michael Gove becomes Justice Minister. Mark Harper has been given the crucial role of chief whip having resigned from his post as immigration minister in February 2014, after he discovered that his cleaner was no longer entitled to work in the UK.

What is fairly certain is that having seen an anti-austerity march in London over the weekend Karl McCartney and his colleagues are going to have to deliver some very clear payback to people for supporting them and soon or the call for an alternative voting system may become more than just a call.

David is a retired NHS nurse, but is currently the Royal College of Nursing’s Council Member for the East Midlands and is Honorary Treasurer of the RCN. David was also a Lib Dem MP candidate for Lincoln in the past. He has two grown up children and enjoys photography and swimming in his spare time.