Conduct Of The Secretary Of State For Health And The Ambulance Staff Pay Dispute

EDM number 316 in 1989-90, proposed by Jimmy Wray on 16/01/1990.

That this House demands that the Government ceases to obstruct the solution of the ambulance services pay dispute which is causing much distress to the public; demands the resignation of the Secretary of State for Health who has repeatedly proved to be unable to face opposition or criticism without reacting with insults and arrogance; is unimpressed by his claims that high rises in salaries can produce a chain of other pay demands since civil servants, ministers, judges and many others are already getting higher pay increases, and since it is the present Prime Minister who without any kind of reservations promised to treat all the emergency services' pay increases in the same way; reminds Her Majesty's Government that in the privatisation exercises carried out so far their treatment of public money has been less than careful and that in water privatisation or the sale of Rover to British Aerospace enormous sums of money were lost to the public purse; believes, like the British people, that ambulance staff deserve the increases in pay which they are asking for and that, contrary to the other cases referred to, this is public money well spent; and believes that no insults or smear campaigns are going to hide the fact that more and more people are seeing this incompetent and uncaring Government for what it is, and that these same people are going to continue their support for the ambulance staff until they win this dispute, which has been artificially prolonged by the Government.

This motion has been signed by a total of 53 MPs, 1 of these signatures have been withdrawn.