In the face of relentless pressure from the Labour government, NHS bosses and the capitalist press, a whopping 83.2% of doctors voted against the latest government offer, on a huge 65.34% turnout and begun strike action on the 17 December.
Disgracefully, Labour health secretary Wes Streeting accused the British Medical Association leadership of “wilful casualness”. They “have chosen to inflict this pain on patients, other staff and the NHS itself. It is one of the most shameful episodes in the long history of the BMA.”
NHS bosses called the action “cruel and calculated”. Yet these attempts to morally blackmail members of the BMA, accusing them of potentially “collapsing the NHS”, have failed.
What is shameful, cruel and calculated is the degradation of NHS services almost to the point of collapse due to underfunding, understaffing, and the drain of billions of pounds of public money being leached into the back pockets of profiteering private companies through privatisation.
The government’s proposal to the doctors’ pay review body is a real-terms pay cut, on top of resident doctors’ pay already being 21% down on 2008. There is also a huge crisis in specialist training places.
Resident doctors – alongside nurses, porters, domestics and all health service workers – are the ones who are actually struggling every day to keep the NHS going. Socialist Party members will be standing with them on the picket line.
“It’s so disheartening watching the service we give to patients progressively deteriorate. Staff are progressively disempowered, so it is increasingly hard to make improvements or resist further worsening of care.
“The only solutions to increasing demand and long waits seem to be to pressure staff to work harder and put in more additional hours. There’s much talk about action on staff wellbeing, but in practice the emotional blackmail to work harder and longer continues apace. Burnout is a real risk. If there is any innovation going on to increase efficiency instead, it’s invisible.
“The long-standing aspiration to excellence is being replaced by a drive to make care as shoddy and as cursory as possible. Watching this and knowing that as you get older you are more likely to have to use these low-quality, downgraded services is really worrying.”
Resident Doctor in Manchester
Joe Woolfall and Isis Smyth report from the picket line at the Royal Hospital in Liverpool.
Kartik Goyal, co-chair of the BMA Merseyside and Cheshire Resident Doctors Committee, explained in more detail the reasons for striking, amid the Labour government’s best efforts to discredit the doctors.
“In the month of October, for example, there were no strikes whatsoever, yet 54,000 patients received corridor care for more than twelve hours. And just yesterday morning, I walked into A&E to see a patient who’d been waiting on a trolley for over twelve hours, with no sleep whatsoever because it’s always loud in the corridor, there’s lights on all the time and there’s so much commotion going on.
Patients need to be cared for, they need to be given adequate dignity about where they’re going to be stationed, and their pain and their sleep and things of that sort needs to be controlled. Yet on a day-to-day basis, there are more patients on the corridor, and that impacts patients’ safety. If a patient’s on a corridor we have less monitoring, we are not able to look after them, we don’t have enough nurses to look after them.
And as you know, there aren’t enough doctors in hospitals. In terms of surgery, patients are waiting eight, nine or more months to get surgery. Yesterday, I was doing a hernia operation for a patient who’d been waiting for over a year in pain, and I don’t think that’s appropriate.
There are two disputes we have with the government. The first one is jobs. This year around 40,000 doctors are expected to apply for around 10,000 training positions. That means training to be the GP of the future, the surgeon of the future.
We require more doctors, we require more GPs, we require more consultants, to help bring down all the waiting lists across the country. And there aren’t any more jobs! There’s been no increase in the number of jobs for quite a few years now.
The second thing is regarding pay. You might have heard it in the media a million times that we’ve had a 22% pay increase, but firstly that’s been over the last couple of years. And the offer we accepted back in 2024 explicitly stated that pay restoration is going to be a journey, it’s not going to stop at that level. But since then the government has not kept up their end of the bargain. They gave us a small increase for 2025-26, and the offer they’ve put out for 2026-27 is 2.5%. That’s just not acceptable.
A lot of the doctors who I’ve trained with here in the UK go to other countries like Australia or New Zealand. We need to retain the doctors we train. I’m a 25 year old doctor and I’m training to be a surgeon, but a lot of my colleagues are going to be unemployed from August.
The hostility from Labour and Wes Streeting is quite unacceptable. We’ve been called names in the media. I expect the health secretary to go out and continue his rhetoric against doctors, but you have to realise that we’re the ones who see what’s happening inside hospitals every single day. I work around 60 hours a week on average.
We’re willing to have a discussion, to come back to the table right this minute. Bring out a deal on pay and jobs, and we’ll work to cancelling the dispute right away. But if that doesn’t happen then we’re going to be back on the picket line again, and that’s something none of us want to do.
We have the best of doctors, our consultants have trained for at least a decade, in hospitals right now looking after the patients. Wes Streeting asked for 95% of elective activity to continue during the strike. Yet what we advocate for during a strike is to focus on emergency and urgent care. But Wes Streeting, or NHS England, keep asking for elective care to keep up. That’s something he’s going to have to sleep with.”
