DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Strikers are holding patients to ransom

It’s hard to imagine anything more contemptible than using the lives of sick patients as a bargaining chip in pay negotiations. Yet that is exactly what the ambulance drivers’ union is doing.

A Unison spokesman warned yesterday that his striking members could ‘choose’ not to provide even vital life-saving cover for those with critical needs, such as heart attack, stroke and sepsis victims.

What a shameful threat. Ambulance crews may not be bound by the Hippocratic Oath but are they really prepared to see people die because of their actions? They must surely be better than that.

Meanwhile, the Royal College of Nursing stands accused of glaring hypocrisy over its stratospheric pay claim. As a trade union, the RCN is striking for a 19 per cent wage increase. Yet it has offered its own employees just 4.5 per cent – lower than the amount its nurses have already rejected.

With inflation and rising costs, it is entirely understandable that the union is strapped for cash and can’t afford to make an inflation-busting pay settlement.

But why should its bosses expect the taxpayer to stump up and fund a wage rise four times higher than they are prepared to give their own workers?

Talks between the RCN and Health Secretary Steve Barclay predictably came to nothing yesterday. But even at this eleventh hour, we would urge all the health unions to call off these ill-advised, unnecessary and deeply damaging strikes.

Their demands are simply unaffordable. Sir Keir Starmer admits it and so does the Labour-run government in Wales, where negotiations with the RCN also broke down yesterday. The walkouts will hurt patients and the reputation of NHS staff. They will achieve nothing.

Brussels in the dock

No one is more pious in lecturing the UK on its legal obligations than the commissars of Brussels, especially over the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

However, following allegations of corruption at the highest levels of the European Parliament, they really should get their own house in order before preaching to others.

Eva Kaili, vice-president of the parliament and one of its most senior law-makers, has been arrested as part of an investigation into suspected bribery by a Gulf state.

Prosecutors suspect huge sums were being paid by this state (reportedly Qatar) to key EU politicians and officials to influence political and economic decisions in which it had an interest.

Four others were arrested and more than £500,000 in cash was seized, along with computers and mobile phones, in a total of 16 searches. There are also allegations of money laundering.

We have long known the EU’s financial accounting was less than transparent, but these accusations, if proved, will be devastating to its reputation.

So next time the EU wants to criticise Britain for supposedly breaching international law, perhaps it should show a little more humility. After all, people in glass houses…

Cheer up, Chancellor!

The Mail understands that we are living through tough economic times. But does Chancellor Jeremy Hunt have to be quite so funereal about our prospects?

Despite a welcome uptick in growth, Microsoft ploughing £1.5billion into the London Stock Exchange and Ford investing £230million in its electric car plant at Halewood, Mr Hunt still sounded like a harbinger of doom, gravely warning things would get worse before they got better.

Constantly talking the economy down risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If big foreign corporations believe so strongly in Britain’s future, is it really too much to ask for the Chancellor to do the same?