Strikes are only as effective as the harm they cause. When the miners downed tools in the 1970s, they plunged the country into darkness. When train drivers walk out, they impose immense annoyance, inconvenience and costs. When doctors go on strike, people die.
That is the logic with which the British Medical Association (BMA) is blackmailing the Government, as its members who are ‘resident’ doctors begin five days of industrial action today. The Health Secretary has, rightly, ordered hospitals to cancel as few appointments as possible. But there will still be cancer diagnoses delayed, procedures cancelled and sick people waiting longer in agony.
Patients should not forgive and doctors should not follow the dangerous lead of this union, which has been taken over by militants. The deputy chair of the BMA, Emma Runswick, calls herself an ‘unashamed socialist’. Chair Tom Dolphin was an election agent for Corbynite MP Dawn Butler and has compared murderer Luigi Mangione to Jesus Christ for ‘stand[ing] up against the rich and powerful’.
You don’t have to take it from me, a right-wing journalist. Take it from the Labour Health Secretary, who has said the chairs were ‘stringing us along’ in negotiations. Take it from Jim Mackey, Chief Executive of NHS England, who has said the BMA is acting in ‘really, really bad faith’ and ‘had no intention of doing anything other than industrial action’. Take it from the 1,000 BMA members who signed a letter condemning its secretive, opaque and unscientific stance on the Cass review. Or take it from Lord Robert Winston, who has quit the BMA in horror over these strikes.
But whatever you make of these Scargills in white coats, what of their demands? Despite having had the most generous pay rises in the public sector – 28.9% over the last three years – the doctors claim their pay has been cut in real terms since 2008. They have used RPI inflation – a measure few economists use – to claim they need a further 29% as ‘pay restoration’, a figure that is plainly absurd. But if you adjust for CPI instead, their pay has fallen by only 4.7%. They have chosen 2008 as their benchmark because, being the year of the global financial crash, it was the end of the generous public spending of the Blair/Brown years. If you measure from 2015 instead, ‘resident’ doctors have had a 7.9% real terms pay rise, alongside pension contributions of around 20%. No individual doctor has had their pay cut in real terms since 2008, since they enjoy fairly rapid pay progression.
It’s not just their figures that don’t stack up – the entire concept of “pay restoration” is flawed. In the private sector, pay is determined by demand, performance and resources within the company. There is no reason a doctor today should be employed on the same terms as one in 2008 – conditions have changed. As a journalist I might like to be paid as though social media hadn’t tanked newspaper sales, but I’m not. There is no centrally determined sum to which any employee is entitled – only a socialist could believe there was.
In fact their best argument is the market-based one that their skills are in demand around the world and they can enjoy better pay and conditions in countries like Australia. But Britain is on the brink of a bond market crisis – there is no more money to pay them. And they have refused to negotiate on working practices, despite the government’s clear willingness to do so – as evidenced by Wes Streeting agreeing to the BMA’s calls to bully their Physician Associate colleagues by renaming them ‘Assistants’ and making them wear special lanyards. And why are doctors better paid in Australia? Because it has a hybrid public/private system where nearly half the population has health insurance.
The problem here isn’t just that the BMA is populated by socialist thugs, it’s that the NHS is a socialist system.
Astonishingly for a Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer has begged the doctors to cross the picket lines, warning that the strikes will ‘play into the hands of those who do not want the NHS to succeed in its current form’. One can but hope.
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