In theory this is just a short term emergency measure, but emergencies that have lasted as long as the current one have a habit of becoming the new reality.
Having destroyed one branch of Bevan's cherished health care project, they are now coming for the next. It would be impossible for them to do much more than cut off limbs of the service and privatise everything that isn't nailed down.
To go further they need to provoke a strike since they believe that will have the dual effect of creating hostility to the nurses and forcing those who can to seek alternative, and paid for, health care. This is, as almost everything Boris does, a foolish and dangerous strategy.
They are relying on the vaccine programme to wipe out covid 19, but vaccines rarely eradicate viruses because they mutate.
It is quite likely that next winter we are going to be even more in need of the NHS than we have been this year. If it has been fragmented, demoralised and incapacitated, the results could be truly ghastly: unthinkable.
But that's the Tory mantra: think the unthinkable and never waste a crisis.
