Resident doctors begin longest strike yet as Streeting accuses BMA of hypocrisy over pay – UK politics live
The health secretary and the BMA trade accusations over who bears responsibility for the collapse of talksGood morning. Resident doctors in English hospitals started a six-day strike at 7am this...
By Andrew Sparrow · The Guardian World
The health secretary and the BMA trade accusations over who bears responsibility for the collapse of talks Good morning. Resident doctors in English hospitals started a six-day strike at 7am this morning. Many of them will continue to work, but there will be enough of them joining the strike to have a significant impact on the care hospitals can deliver. It is the 15th resident doctors (who used to be known as junior doctors) have been on stage since they launched a campaign in 2023 to get their pay back to the equivalent level it used to be before austerity kicked in after the financial crash. This morning Wes Streeting , the health secretary, deployed a new statistic in his PR battle against the BMA, the doctors’ union organised the strikes. He confirmed a figure highlighted in the Daily Mail’s splash saying strikes by resident doctors have now cost the country £3bn. We think that strikes cost £50m a day. And so that is, an accurate reflection of the cost of these strikes. What is true is that in order to deliver a full pay restoration back to 2008 levels, using the RPI account of inflation, it would cost in the order of £3bn a year. Let’s then assume that other NHS staff would understandably demand the same. Then that cost would be more like £30bn a year. That is more than the entire cost of the Ministry of Justice’s entire budget for running the criminal justice system. Continue reading...