No 10 says NHS is getting ‘funding it needs’ and refuses to accept service is ‘in crisis’ – UK politics live

Good morning, and happy new year. You’ll be glad to hear that I haven’t recorded a new year’s messsage for you all, but if you’re missing out you can try Rishi Sunak’s first one (which was even more banal than these things usually are, and included the claim that he became PM three months ago, when it is more like two months), his second one (which was an improvement, and may have been recorded as a repair job), Keir Starmer’s (which was more prime ministerial, and had enough union jack presence to match a Liz Truss video), or Boris Johnson’s, which in some ways was the most interesting of the lot.

As usual, the former PM was peddling boosterism and, as well as saying he expected the economy to recover and Vladimir Putin to lose in Ukraine, he said 2023 would be the year when the UK would “finally start to take advantage of all our new freedoms, lengthening our lead as the best place on earth to invest, to start a business, raise a family, or just hang out in the pub”.

He may have been right on his final point, because pubs are British institutions, and so you would expect them to be particularly good here. But when he spoke about “new freedoms”, Johnson did not even mention Brexit (perhaps conscious that it is increasingly seen as a mistake) and, as he ran through his “best place on earth” spiel, he seemed to be finding it hard to conceal his awareness of how hollow this sounded.

Britain may be good for visits to the pub. But if you were looking for somewhere that might be the best place on earth to call an ambulance, catch a train, schedule a GP appointment, secure an above-inflation pay rise, heat your home at a reasonable cost, get seen by a doctor at A&E, ensure families don’t need to visit food banks, export to the EU, afford to buy your first home, get the police to catch a burglar, recruit staff to work in hospitality, find decent adult social care, obtain affordable childcare, secure a rape conviction or even book a driving test – then obviously you would avoid Britain at all costs.

As my colleague Gwyn Topham reports in his overnight story, this week’s episode of Britain isn’t working is dominated by the rail strikes.

Related: Most UK train services out of action as five days of strikes begin

Two of the main protagonists in the dispute, Mick Lynch, the RMT general secretary, and Mark Harper, the transport secretary, have both been giving interviews this morning. But neither of them have been saying anything very new, and both continue to accuse the other side of intransigence. “What we need to hear now from the government is exactly what it is they are going to propose to us,” Lynch told Sky News. “I think it is time that the RMT got off the picket line and round the negotiating table to try and hammer out a deal with the train operating companies and Network Rail,” Harper told Times Radio.

Rishi Sunak has promised to bring forward legislation this year that would limit the ability of the rail unions to cause disruption by requiring minimum service levels to be maintained while strikes are on. In an interview with the Today programme, Harper said that, while this might help commuters in the future, it would not be a solution to this dispute. He said:

For the disputes that are going on at the moment, the way we’ve got to sort those out is by getting people back around the table and resolving the dispute.

Minimum service level legislation may well be something that will help for the medium term, but it isn’t going to be a solution for the rail strikes that are going on at the moment.

Parliament is not sitting this week, but we have got a No 10 lobby briefing at 11.30am, and so we should get some fresh lines from the government then on rail, the crisis in A&E departments, and the many other problems facing the country as it heads into 2023.

I’ll try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com.