Resident doctors’ five-day strike in December last year took place despite a barrage of anti-doctor propaganda from the government and mainstream media.
By Dr Jackie Grunsell
This was part of an ongoing dispute, since 2023, in which resident doctors have shown their determination to stand firm against this Labour government in the only national industrial dispute since Starmer came to power.
Disgracefully, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has tried everything to discredit the strikers, making claims that ‘a majority didn’t vote for this’. The reality is a decisive 83.2% voted in favour of action on a turnout of over 65% – well above the legal threshold for action. Starmer has called doctors ‘reckless’ and blamed them for wrecking the NHS’s recovery, while Streeting describes them as casually inflicting pain and misery on patients. This kind of anti-union rhetoric is being parroted across the mainstream media.
Pay restoration
Doctors are fighting for pay restoration due to real-terms pay cuts since 2008. They are also demanding reforms to deal with the logjam in specialty training posts. Last year, 30,000 doctors applied for just 10,000 specialty posts – all while patients are languishing on many months-long waiting lists. The government has suggested an increase of just 2,000 posts, which does nothing to address the gap in what’s needed.
Mind-blowing as it seems, GP trainees are unable to get jobs as GPs. This is because practices that have been underfunded for successive years are unable to afford to employ more doctors, even though there is a desperate need for more patient appointments. Confronted with increased workloads, a cost of living crisis and pay degradation, many doctors are taking the decision to leave the UK to work in more favourable conditions in other parts of the world. Some are just leaving medicine altogether.
Doctors vow to fight on
The British Medical Association (BMA) recently reballoted their members to continue the strike, reaching an impressive 93.4% vote to carry on the action, indicating the resolute mood of doctors to seriously reverse the attacks on their wages since 2010.
We fully support the action being taken and would urge the BMA to go further to improve the chances of a victory. All-out action could force a government climbdown, but resident doctors need the solidarity of other health workers who are also suffering under decades long real terms pay cuts, understaffing, growing workloads and a collapsing NHS.
Patients are being told to blame NHS staff for the crisis caused by successive governments’ underfunding and privatising of healthcare.
Every part of the NHS is under-resourced and in need of massive investment. Resident doctors need support from the wider profession and public to fight to rebuild an NHS fit for purpose. Doctors are fighting to be able to give patients the service they deserve.
Ending the profiteering of private companies, who are siphoning money out of the service to pay shareholders for dodgy PFI deals or to run outsourced services at taxpayers expense, is the thing putting lives at risk. This is something Labour has no intention of reversing.
Socialist Alternative members are campaigning within Your Party to make sure that the NHS is fully renationalised – kicking out the private companies that leech from the service, bringing all staff back under the NHS, with full restoration of pay. We will continue to build solidarity for doctors and other health workers on strike – which is one of the most powerful forms of action ordinary people can take in defence of our NHS.
