Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin will be “laughing all the way to the bank” about Government plans to send in the army to assist the NHS during the planned strike on Thursday, according to a senior military figure.
Former military intelligence officer Philip Ingram said that soldiers would see it as a “kick in the guts” to be ordered in to replace their much higher-paid NHS colleagues.
Philip Ingram appeared on GB News
GB News
He was speaking amid reports the Government COBRA committee met to discuss sending in the military to assist the NHS during the first planned strike on Thursday.
Asked how soldiers would react to being drafted in, he told GB News: “I was talking to the wife of a lance corporal in the Army only earlier and she summed it up quite well, saying that when you're within the military, better pay, better staffing levels, better working conditions are just a pipe dream of every service person everywhere“It's not the sort of thing that the military get, they get thrown in to deal with, and pick up the detritus that's left by people who are paid better than them and who are asking for better pay deals.”
Speaking to Patrick Christys, he added: “Army pay rise: have been well below inflation this year, they got 3.75% for those lower pay rates, higher pay rates got 3.5%. A young soldier on training is on just over £16,000 a year, that's after the pay rise and whenever they come out fully trained they're on £21,425 per year. That's after the pay rise.
“That is significantly less than any of the other emergency service workers and I don't deny that they need more money, but it's putting it into context. And it's a bit of a kick in the guts where you've got people getting smaller pay rises imposed on them, they've got no representation outside whatsoever and have to fill these jobs over a holiday period.”
On the planned Border Force strike, Mr Ingram said: “I wouldn't knock their professionalism and all the rest of it, but what we're seeing at the moment is a perfect storm.
“If we look at what's going on across Europe, we listen to the unions, we listen to certain politicians, and they seem to think that everything is done to the government, the government, the government, when actually there are similar issues happening in every country across Europe in lots of countries across the world.
“We have to start to ask the question why and we keep hearing Ukraine coming up and that is one of the major causes of the economic woes that we're in at the moment.
“But this level of disruption that we're seeing and disintegration of public services across the country - if I was Vladimir Putin sitting in Moscow, I'd be sitting there behind my big old desk at the moment with a white cat on my knee stroking it and smiling, [saying] that the UK is doing everything to itself that I would like to be doing myself.”
Ingram said the strikes would '100% be helping Putin'
Reuters
Asked if the strikers were helping Putin, he told GB News: “Oh, hugely, 100% is helping him, yeah. He will be laughing all the way to the bank over this because of the disruption that this is causing…but the fact is that service personnel are having to stand in for a lot of these people who are much better paid than them.
“…our nurses are overworked, our paramedics are overworked, our police are overworked, our Border Force staff are overworked. I'm not going to talk about the train staff, because I actually don't think they are, as a regular train user, our service personnel are overworked.
“The answer isn't going out on strike. That is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, the answer is to sit down and talk and negotiate and you work out things from an adult perspective,
“Our police can't go on strike, our service personnel can't go on strike, yet it seems as if everyone else who can is doing it. And surprise, surprise, it always seems to happen during a holiday period.“It never seems to happen at other times of the year and that makes me just a little cynical.”