“Patient safety is the floor. That floor comes first,” said the floor’s most-respected Yes voice. Yet No narrowly won this self-selected vote, producing a verdict closer than the intensity of the arguments might have suggested.
The winning side was quieter but made the institutional case: “A blanket ban on strikes won't fix public services,” its strongest argument warned, arguing instead for fair pay, independent arbitration and agreed emergency cover. Other No voters treated the right to withdraw labour as the principle at stake: “Where would you stop?”
Yes voters were more numerous and ranged from reluctant appeals to patient safety to outright hostility towards unions. One argued that strikes had become “a first resort now, not a last resort”, while others focused on pay, pensions, private practice and the conviction that alternative industrial action should be allowed where lives were not at risk.
The two sides often talked past each other. No voters described unsafe staffing and nurses who “shouldn't have to work the long shifts they do” while defending a basic legal right; Yes voters saw repeated disruption, untreated illness and a public with no alternative provider. The argument therefore sat inside the wider national dispute over minimum service rules: whether emergency cover can protect patients without removing workers’ leverage altogether.
The room did not reject the right to strike so much as fail to trust it in services where delay can become harm. That is why the narrowest of No wins still reads like an unresolved argument.
15 Opinions
It’s simple we have a political party that funds through taxpayers a fifth column that extorts outcomes by coercing those who pay their salaries & pensions. This is the Unions, always ramming Marxism down our throats. They should receive no tax payers funds and be regarded as potential terrorists due to the chaos they intentionally cause.
A difficult vote as striking is a powerful tool for workers getting decent terms, but there have been far too many strikes which have put lives at risk and left people with untreated health issues so Ibhave had to vote against striking. The police already can’t strike after this right was given up in a pay deal years ago and I think the big pay rises Labour gave when they came to power should have come with the same condition.
Yes, but other forms of industrial action should be allowed, where lives are not at stake.
The imbalance is obvious, when the public is forced to pay for it and it's our only choice it's fundamentally unfair. 30% employer pension contributions being the most farcical imbalance.
No one should have their right to withdraw their labour from them. It's one of the basic rights of human exsistance. I was always told only a bad boss needs to fear a union, I can honestly say that in my whole working career that was true. In fact one of the best companies I ever worked for actively engaged with and encourage union participation in making the company one of the most successful companies in the industry I worked in
Yes because I think the unions have abused their power. They strike as a first resort now, not a last resort, and they don't know how to compromise any more.
Strikes force action, that is the whole point of them. Nurses shouldn't have to work the long shifts they do, and then need a foodbank to be able to survive. We "clapped for the NHS" during Covid, and then when it was mostly over, and talk of pay was raised, the Government quickly forgot what they were asked to do during Covid.
Sorry you have to be able to withdraw your labour. Where would you stop? Power workers,we need electricity. Delivery driver? Stuff has to be distributed. On and on.
It is their legal right, and banning them from striking just increases the risk of a general strike across all sectors and not just the NHS & other emergency services.
Stop entitling the entitled.