Junior doctors will walk out for six days from next Monday after Starmer’s 48-hour ultimatum expired without a deal. Their 15th strike since 2023…
Starmer had threatened to pull a package of 1,000 extra training places and pay reforms if the BMA did not call off the action. They didn’t, and now the strike is going ahead. The BMA’s ‘resident doctors committee chair’ Jack Fletcher claimed the government was using the places as “a pawn” in negotiations, insisting the existing 3.5% pay offer was too weak. They want “full pay restoration” equivalent to a 26% pay rise, thank you very much…
Ludicrous, given Labour has already handed them the highest pay rises in the public sector for two consecutive years. Guido is old enough to remember when just ‘getting around the table’ would be enough for Streeting to put an end to this…
Chief Secretary to the Treasury James Murray has said he “can’t quite believe” the British Medical Association’s decision to strike after even Labour handed junior doctors the highest pay rises in the public sector for two years in a row. Old lessons about the unions are being relearnt…
The BMA continues to demand ridiculous “full pay restoration” equivalent to a 26% pay rise and has organised six days of strikes from April 7 to April 13. Starmer has written in the Times to threaten the withdrawal of a deal offer from the government if the union does not back down within two days…
The union has not consulted its members formally on strikes. Murray told Sky News this morning:
“I think the decision to go on strike is reckless. Um, to be honest, I can’t quite believe that the BMA leadership are doing this that they’ve got a, you know, a really good offer on the table, a really decent offer that will improve working lives for resident doctors. And they’re doing this without even putting the offer to resident doctors themselves to take a decision on. Um, and it will harm resident doctors, you know, as well as as harming, of course, the NHS and patients. Um, so I think it’s the wrong thing to do and I would, you know, really urge them to reconsider and think again.”
This is what happens when you let the incompetents in the union-backed party into government, by the way…
Wes Streeting has warned the combination of surging super flu cases and the junior doctors’ strikes next week means the NHS faces its worst week since the first days of the pandemic. ‘One minute to midnight…’
Speaking to Nick Ferrari on LBC this morning, Streeting blasted the BMA for holding the NHS to ransom and putting staff at risk:
“The thing that I am genuinely fearful of is even if I throw more money at this situation now at this time to get us through the next week of strikes, there’s only a finite number of doctors and staff. There’s only a finite number of care home beds and community-based care… So if you’ve got strikes and you’ve got flu, and you’ve got all these challenges on corridors, and you’ve got demand going up rather than down, I just don’t think there’s a lever I can pull, I don’t think there’s an amount of money I can throw that means I can sit on your programme and guarantee patient safety over the next week…
I don’t understand why the BMA have not been willing to compromise.”
We are a long way from ‘getting around the table’ and ending the threat of strikes just by electing a Labour government…
The RMT has announced rolling strike action across the tube network and DLR beginning on Friday 5 September for seven days – different grades will take industrial action at differing times. Details:
- Sunday 7 Sept – Track Access Controllers, London Underground Control Centre, Power/Control and ERU members will strike all day.
- Monday 8 Sept – All fleet, engineering, stations and train drivers will strike all day.
- Tuesday 9 Sept – Signallers will strike all day.
- Wednesday 10 Sept – All fleet, engineering, stations and train drivers will strike all day.
- Thursday 11 Sept – Signallers will strike all day.
RMT blames pay and conditions including a lack of movement on “fatigue management, shift patterns and a reduction in the working week.” Pass the sick cup…
DLR staff will strike in the same period. Tube drivers are paid about £68,000.
The UK lost 279,000 working days to labour disputes in the first six months of 2025 alone. That’s equivalent to just over 1,073 years.
Here’s the full breakdown from the grisly ONS labour market statistics:
- January 50,000
- February 52,000
- March 55,000
- April 47,000
- May 37,000
- June 38,000
Total 279,000
A millennium and change lost to strikes. Meanwhile this morning Wes Streeting claimed the “jury is out” over a pay deal with junior doctors, and Birmingham’s bin strike rumbles on and on…
More in Common has polled the public and found that in a matter of weeks the public’s view on how to approach junior doctor strikes has flipped. The BMA may have pushed the boat out a little too far on this one…
On 14 July British adults believed “the government should prioritise preventing resident doctors from going on strikes, even if it means increased spending on doctors pay” by 58 to 42 points. By 28 July that had dropped to 38 points versus 41. A switch…
Only Labour 2024 voters think strikes should be warded off with concessions. Incredibly more people think junior doctors are paid too much than too little. Even doctors are starting to feel the shame. The number of strikers dropped by 7.5% this time compared to June and July last year. The NHS says it maintained 93% of pre-planned care during the strike. Brits have been turning on the ludicrous strike action for some time now…
Speaking at an IPPR think tank event in London, the Health Secretary compared striking junior doctors to mutinous sailors.
“I feel like we’ve turned the ship, the boat’s going in the right direction, except some of the crew are trying to row in one direction while the rest of us are going in the other. You can’t make progress that way. We are seeing an improving NHS, and we’ve seen improvement despite resident doctors’ strikes, but the fact is, performance would have been better and there would have been more money to invest in staff and services if the BMA hadn’t been undertaking the strike action.”
