On the picket line, Kartik Goyal, co-chair of the BMA Merseyside and Cheshire Resident Doctors Committee, explained the reasons for striking, amid the Labour government’s best efforts to discredit the doctors. The BMA is now reballoting for strike action.
In October, there were no strikes whatsoever, yet 54,000 patients received corridor care for more than 12 hours. Just yesterday morning, I walked into A&E to see a patient who’d been waiting on a trolley for over 12 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. Their pain, and their sleep, and things of that sort, need to be controlled.
If a patient is 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.
There aren’t enough doctors in hospitals. 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.
We have two disputes with the government. The first one is jobs.
This year, 40,000 doctors are expected to apply for 10,000 training positions. We require more doctors, we require more GPs, we require more consultants, to help bring down waiting lists.
The second thing is pay. You might have heard in the media a million times that we’ve had a 22% pay increase.
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, 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 health secretary Wes Streeting is unacceptable. We’ve been called names in the media.
But we’re the ones who see what’s happening inside hospitals every single day. I work 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 cancel the dispute right away.
But if that doesn’t happen, then we’re going to be back on the picket line again. That’s something none of us want to do.
We have the best of doctors in hospitals right now looking after patients – our consultants have trained for at least a decade. 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.
The Socialist Party says:
- Fully fund our NHS
- No more privatisation – kick out the profiteers
- Democratic public ownership of pharmaceutical giants and medical manufacturers
- Inflation-proof pay rises that actually match the real cost of living
- Support workers striking back
- Make the super-rich pay
- Trade unions must organise a national demo against Labour austerity
