A CONSERVATIVE MP’s claim that nurses who use food banks must lack basic budgeting skills rightly sparked uproar as Royal College of Nursing members returned to the picket lines today.

Socialist comedian Mark Steel once mocked the Tory tendency to blame individuals for the consequences of their own economic policies, remembering how Thatcher’s ministers blamed the unemployed for being too lazy to find work.

There must have been a very sudden rise in laziness to account for the sudden surge in unemployment to over three million in the first four years of Thatcherism, he quipped, “which was convenient since it coincided with the invention of the duvet.”

Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland MP Simon Clarke shows a similar disregard for the facts with his assertion that nurses earn enough. 

When the Tories entered power in 2010, nurses were not using food banks. Indeed, hardly anyone was. The very term “food bank” barely existed in popular discourse before David Cameron and George Osborne began the wrecking rampage through public services and welfare they termed “austerity.”

Conservatives find it awkward to acknowledge an obvious truth any schoolchild could point out: that a rise in food bank use is down to a rise in poverty. This is why ideologues like Lord Tebbit have tried to explain it away with claims that there is unlimited demand for free products, as if people set up charitable ventures at random and then find out whether anyone wants them.

Yet poverty did rise as austerity began to bite and the number of children in poverty who were from working households rose still more sharply, from just over half in 2010 to two-thirds by the end of the decade. As the far from left-wing think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies found in a 2015 study, the trend reflected “falls in real incomes [reducing] the earnings of working families.”

All the furore about “making work pay” by attacking social security, all the brutality around benefit sanctions and the horrific, outsourced, target-driven “fit for work” tests existed to hide the dismal truth that the Tories were not making work pay: they were making work pay less, so being out of work had to be made into a living hell.

All this is relevant today because current Chancellor Jeremy Hunt — a key player in those austerity governments — is determined to impose another round of the same.

Nurses are driven to rely on food banks because price-gouging by corporate profiteers and supply disruption caused by the Ukraine war and retaliatory sanctions have led inflation to soar. 

Even the retail price index figure, while a better guide than the consumer price index, can be misleading as prices have risen much faster for essentials like energy and food, which poorer people spend more of their income on.

But this inflationary crisis is hitting a workforce that has been steadily losing real-terms pay for more than a decade. Nurses have lost 8 per cent of their income in real terms since 2010, roughly equal to losing an entire month’s income over a year.

As real pay falls, staff leave the NHS for jobs that can better support them and their families, a cause of the chronic staffing crisis which in turn places inhuman workloads on those that remain, leading to burnout, demoralisation and more staff leaving in a vicious cycle.

MPs who question nurses’ budgeting skills should be asked why it is fair that nurses should have lost real income for 12 years — even when Britain’s GDP was growing.

We cannot run a functioning NHS without respecting and rewarding its workers appropriately. 

Nurses’ pay has been under attack since 2010, and in a couple of short years since the pandemic began they have gone from heroes to zeroes in the Tory narrative. They deserve better, and the huge displays of support on picket lines show the country knows it.