Ashworth has been pressing on this key issue in Parliament and TV studios.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is trying to enforce the message by highlighting “the broken system of statutory sick pay,” as has Labour chair Anneliese Dodds. 

It’s a crucial issue, but also one showing Labour’s weakness. It looks too much like another case of the party arriving a day late and a dollar short to the real fight.

In Britain, the minimum levels of sick pay are desperately low. Surveys show around 57 per cent of UK workers get decent “company sick pay” — typically meaning full pay when off sick.

However, around 26 per cent get only the legal minimum of statutory sick pay (SSP).

That’s a very big group: it means around six million workers, especially low-paid manual staff, are stuck on SSP. 

Britain’s SSP is among the lowest minimum-level sick pay in the “developed” world.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found minimum sick pay covers 100 per cent of pay “in many countries in northern and central Europe.” 

Among all the 37 “higher-income” OECD members, on average legal minimum sick pay replaces 70 per cent of wages.

Britain’s minimum sick pay only covers 20 per cent of wages. 

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) also found nearly two million mostly female workers don’t even get SSP because they earn below the SSP “lower earnings limit” of £120 a week and get precisely zero per cent of their wages when sick.

This all has a hard impact on the sick and has had a magnifying effect on Covid-19.

The latest National Audit Office report on Covid-19 reiterates that “public compliance” with Covid-19 rules “is still low or variable,” with just “43 per cent of all people with symptoms” self-isolating. 

Only a minority of people with symptoms request a test. All the attempts to “test and trace” or quarantine the virus are undermined by the fact that people avoid tests and won’t self-isolate. 

Poor sick pay is a key reason for low compliance: many low-paid people don’t self-isolate and avoid tests because they can’t afford time off on measly SSP.

Fixing sick pay would both be a matter of social justice and also be a key way of stopping the pandemic.

It’s one where the government has felt under pressure. Back in March 2020 TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady challenged then health secretary Matt Hancock on BBC Question Time, asking if he could live on the £95 a week SSP.

Hancock honestly answered “no.” Back in March 2020 then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell demanded the government introduce a “furlough” scheme for jobs shut down by Covid-19 and higher mandatory sick pay “from day one” for all workers.

Labour won the demand for furlough, but the government resisted sick pay. Then when Starmer became Labour leader, the demand dissipated. 

Starmer has raised sick pay in Parliament four times, Corbyn raised it 14 times.

Starmer did not press on sick pay in Parliament until November 2020, and only did so sporadically — because he had drifted off into something else, which he called “constructive opposition” — although it didn’t offer much opposition and avoided the very constructive issue of sick pay.

The BBC’s Nick Robinson joked that Starmer’s approach in Parliament meant saying: “I back the government’s measures on coronavirus but why doesn’t the PM admit he’s hopeless and incompetent?”

It wasn’t that much of an exaggeration. Starmer made lots of “managerial” noises about “putting the government on notice,” but spent a great deal of time avoiding opposition.

Starmer told the Telegraph in February: “At times like this you back the government where you think they are getting right … everybody is concerned that we pull through this, and pull through it together.” 

Last September he told Parliament: “I have supported all the measures the Prime Minister has introduced, as he well knows. It is the right thing to do.”

Last July Starmer declared in the Commons: “It is perfectly proper and right for the opposition to set out the parts of the package that we support the government on and to highlight where there are problems.” 

But the actual highlighting of problems — including sick pay — fell by the wayside.

So it’s good that Labour is going for a small co-ordinated push on sick pay now. But “message discipline” doesn’t last a few months. You have to hammer home simple messages longer than that to get a hearing.

At heart this is because “message discipline” isn’t a PR technique, it’s about what you believe in. Labour needs to show it believes in real change based on the economic needs of working people.

The message Starmer drifted off into last year, in his plan to “engage constructively with the government” over Covid-19, was the message that he would like to cosplay being a junior member of an imaginary coalition with the Conservatives.

He wanted to “look like a prime minister” rather than act like an opposition.

Sadly, this meant he missed both the chance to press for — and possibly win — real changes in sick pay, and the chance to get noticed enough to even have a chance of being a future prime minister. 

There is a daft saying favoured by the wannabe “self-improver” that it feels like Starmer must be saying to himself — “dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Turn up with a suit and a briefcase for your office junior post, and you can eventually will make your way into the director’s chair. 

I don’t think it works in the office and it certainly doesn’t work in politics.

Starmer keeps dressing up like he is a current prime minister — or perhaps more like a Nick Clegg-style deputy prime minister — when he should be doing the job he has, which is leading the opposition.