A quick word of advice to one and all - don't get ill in March! | Mark Dolan

A quick word of advice to one and all - don't get ill in March, when the nursing unions are threatening to deliver their toughest industrial action, with nursing staff expected to walk out of A&E and cancer wards.

The moral case for the strikes was slender at best, given that the nurses have a century-long tradition of not going on strike, a sacred rule, tied in with their commitment to sick people, which they - for some reason - were happy to tear up this year. Why have the nursing unions had empathy for patients for 100 years, but not now? This is progress, is it?

The politicisation of a workforce whose sole job is to care for unwell people. Now to be clear, I believe the nurses deserve a pay rise. Whilst I have encouraged Rishi Sunak to push back on inflation-busting pay rises across the public sector, which risk baking high prices into the system for years to come, it's clear the nurses deserve something. And I think they will get their bump.

What nurses do for all of us, particularly during the pandemic, in which they went through hell, is incalculable. Our nurses are the best of us. But they have been badly let down and their reputation tainted by the activities of their union, who have engineered this strike action. They talk about their members’ wage packets, fair enough. They are all about the bottom line. Well, the bottom line is that the country is over 2 trillion quids worth in debt.

The bottom line is we have inflation which is making everyone poorer - and any public sector pay rises will prolong the agony. The bottom line is we have a wrecked economy, thanks to the experiment of lockdowns, of which ALL of the unions were such fans. You reap what you sow. The bottom line is that with nurses absent from A&E and cancer wards, patients will be impacted, and it doesn't take a genius to work out, that lives will be lost. That's the bottom line.

The bottom line is that the NHS has a waiting list of over 7 million people, fuelled of course by the aforementioned lockdowns and which will only have been worsened, by this industrial action. I've seen the strikes and the impact on human life with my own eyes, witnessing a serious motorbike accident during the ambulance strike last month. A woman on the floor with a possible broken ankle, and a man with a smashed-up knee, both lying there for over an hour, with no ambulance able to take them to the hospital. In the end, a cop car took them. I'm sure there are far worse stories than that.