Published by The i paper (25th July, 2025)
It is painfully symbolic that the British Medical Association (BMA) prepared for its latest round of strikes by sending its first delegation to the Durham Miners Gala. It has, after all, inherited the miners’ mantle as our country’s most powerful union, led by political activists determined to flex their industrial muscle regardless of any wider costs to the nation. So it is no surprise to see those marching medics included deputy chairwoman Emma Runswick, an “unashamedly socialist” junior doctor who is a leading light in a faction whose logo is a stethoscope and reflex hammer arranged like a hammer and sickle. She once bragged about “lefties” pushing their union to greater militancy.
The big difference, however, is that those miners who went deep underground to carry out risky work were working-class heroes, ultimately fighting in defence of their communities and jobs. The striking doctors, by contrast, are largely middle-class professionals determined to cream off as much cash as possible from the coffers of a woefully struggling National Health Service in a debt-laden nation. Their hideously selfish latest action means many patients will suffer pain for longer. Some might die. No wonder the Government and hospital chiefs are so infuriated by the BMA’s dogmatic refusal to even delay the five-day strike by the resident doctors – as junior doctors have been rebranded – which is due to start on Friday.
As health and social care minister Wes Streeting has said, this action is unjustified and shows contempt for patients after doctors received the highest pay rise in the public sector for two successive years, lifting pay by almost a third over the past three years. Now they demand another 29 per cent. Thankfully, it seems the Government has learned the foolishness of capitulating to industrial blackmail, offering instead a 5.4 per cent rise – once again, the highest pay hike in the public sector. Even Ross Nieuwoudt, co-chair of the BMA’s resident doctors’ committee, confessed that this is generous. Yet he also talked about being “excited” over further walkouts – before walking that back somewhat – reminding us again how these entitled agitators are the true successors of Arthur Scargill.
Let us hope Streeting and his government colleagues have the tenacity to resist this strike, ideally shattering this self-serving and destructive union’s stranglehold on the NHS in the process. This can only be achieved by Labour, given its role in the creation of the institution almost 80 years ago and the electorate’s consequent lack of confidence in the Tories on this issue. Westminster has shed at last the damaging delusion that Britain’s health system is envied around the world – something I sought for years after seeing its gross deficiencies in treating some of our most vulnerable citizens. Now this is the crucial next step in the salvation of our costly, creaking, and precious health system.
For eight decades, the approach of successive governments has been to buy off doctors to placate any unrest while their union exploited public faith in physicians and admiration for their skills. Yet the BMA was repeatedly on the wrong side of history – most notably when it attempted to block 500 Jewish doctors from fleeing the Nazis and resisted recognising their qualifications, insisting on two more years of study in the UK and insisted on two more years’ study in Britain, and fought against the creation of the NHS. It resisted expansion of training places for years to protect members, so more than a third of NHS doctors are now from abroad. And while posing as saintly protectors of our most cherished public service, it took action to ensure consultants could continue with lucrative private work and to defend gold-plated pensions far beyond the reach of most private sector workers.
Yet until nine years ago, strikes by doctors were rare, with just two national actions since 1948. Then came the lengthy 2016 dispute with the Tories over junior doctor contracts, which the union insisted was really about “safety, not pay”. Leaked messages between BMA leaders, however, revealed this was untrue – along with their desire to draw out protests to tie health chiefs “in knots” for up to 18 months, joining mediation talks simply “to play the political game of always looking reasonable”, in the words of one top figure.
These militant medics have taken industrial action 11 times over the last three years, leading to 1.5m cancelled appointments in the already overloaded, post-Covid NHS – and costing taxpayers an estimated £3bn – before winning their huge pay rise last year. Five deaths were linked to the disruption by coroners.
BMA bosses, warning this wave of strikes could last years, know that Labour’s key pledge to cut waiting lists is threatened by this dispute. Now they have the grotesque cheek to argue it is NHS chiefs who are putting patients at risk by refusing to cancel routine appointments while they parade their sanctimony on picket lines. It is to the credit of Sir Jim Mackey, the new chief executive of NHS England, that he is urging “a different approach this time” with tougher resistance and financial penalties, bolstered by polls showing plummeting support among the public for strikes (and, indeed, among their members). As the fertility pioneer Sir Robert Winston told The Times this month after quitting the union, such “highly damaging” actions shred trust in their noble profession at a time when so many other people are struggling.
Yes, younger doctors face generational issues over housing and student debt, while working in the NHS, they must often feel relentless. Yet they are among the better-paid and most secure workers at their age. The BMA is also balloting senior doctors in a dispute over pay for NHS consultants, who reportedly earn on average £145,000 a year (excluding any private work). It is simply unsustainable to keep pumping more and more of a disgruntled electorate’s cash into the health system as society ages and medicine keeps advancing, if much of it ends up in the pockets of doctors – especially amid declining productivity. This has been seen far too often in the past. So if we want to save the NHS, this grasping union making threats to cause “terrible disruption” must be defeated, like the miners and their militant leadership were crushed.