Dear Mr Barclay, on 20 December you accused hardworking and dedicated paramedics of making ‘a conscious choice to inflict harm on patients’.

Every decent person I know has recoiled in disgust at your comments.

Harm is being daily inflicted on patients by your government, Mr Barclay—even on days when there are no strikes. The 93-year-old woman left screaming in pain with a broken hip on a care home floor for twenty-five hours before being taken to hospital. The 83-year-old woman, again with a broken hip, who had to wait fourteen hours before an ambulance was able to collect her, and a further twenty-six hours in a queue of ambulances before she could be taken inside the hospital building. The 73-year-old man whose family had to drive him to hospital after being told he would have to wait nine hours for an ambulance—a decision which probably saved his life.

None of that is down to striking paramedics, Mr Barclay. It’s all down to you.

You and your leader, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, have refused to negotiate over NHS pay, claiming that the pay rises NHS workers are seeking are unaffordable. It’s a word a lot of public sector workers are using, Mr Barclay—about their rent, their mortgage, their gas bill, their grocery shopping. Your government is presiding over ruinous increases of the basic costs of living. Nurses shouldn’t need to be relying on food banks.

And please don’t try to gaslight us about it being the same the world over, Mr Barclay. It’s not.

Conservative MP Jake Berry recently said that staff struggling with the cost of living should just go and get a better paid job. If that is the Conservative Party’s advice to nurses, paramedics, and other essential health workers unable to get by on what they earn in the public sector, the already desperate shortage of NHS staff would become even more catastrophic.

That really would be a conscious choice to inflict harm on patients, Mr Barclay.