As I tweeted yesterday:
There is a junior doctor's strike next week. Patients will be harmed , but they are anyway everyday by a government that does not care and which has pushed doctors to the limit in the Tories' attempt to break the NHS. And is the BBC talking about this? Of course not….
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) March 11, 2023
The BBC discussed the budget yesterday, and Lineker, and anything but the fact that the NHS has reached the point where junior doctors are paid less than people in Pret and is falling apart due to the deliberate stranglehold on funding supplied to it by successive Tory governments.
The focus in the media was on what could not supposedly be said about a government that is failing us rather than on what that government needs to do to serve us.
On Friday doctors met the government to discuss pay. No minister bothered to turn up.
Yesterday the government appealed to doctor's consciences but this is a government that now denies the reality of Covid and refuses to let people be treated for it whilst ignoring maybe 500 excess deaths a week because of its failure to fund the NHS adequately. The need for a conscience falls on ministers and not those who know things are only getting worse.
Is this situation recoverable? The answer is yes. But not with anything either the Tories or Labour are proposing at present. Neoliberalism and its hatred of government is the problem here. And both those parties are fully paid up subscribers to that philosophy. People will continue dying as a result.
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Absolutely.
Well over a million infected with covid, 6000 in hospital with it (and four of our friends this weekend) – and now, without publishing any science advice they are going to abandon the only decent source of data about who and how many are infected with what variant – the ONS covid surveillance survey – a ‘gold standard’. Epidemiologists , virologists, immunologists in despair – deliberate killing.
They claim the budget will have measures to persuade people back to work – yet are happy to that several hundred thousand of working age are long term sick and over 2 million with long covid.
The fact a government can do this ought to be seen as a constitutional crisis – ‘elected dictatorship’.
Agreed
We were seen by junior doctors over the last two weeks at A&E. I had no idea that their pay was that low. They were all great people.
My worry remains that people know something is wrong but that they will – with the help of fascist techniques – be thrown off the scent and not ‘look up’.
I do hope not.
But as you say – where is Laboured? If they do not fill the void with a different story, it will just get filled with lies.
And so we’ll keep going around and around in circles.
My view is that the mega rich have called time on the NHS and now its open season on other public services too.
If these neo-liberals worship at the alter of market forces why doesn’t this apply to NHS wages?
If you are short about 100,000 of staff shouldn’t the obvious solution be to pay more?
Yes
But they don’t believe in market signals, clearly
Presumably they are hoping it will push the doctors out of the NHS and into the private sector. Clearly they have not thought through the training implications – looks like we are in for a rocky period.
The BMA have been pretty useless though – where have they been for the past 10 years? To ask for 35% because they haven’t been dealing with its up til now is hardly likely to go down well with most of the public – it just sounds a ludicrous ask.
“the government appealed to doctor’s consciences ” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????$%^%^%^$$£@~:~{@{!!! from this ‘government’, of all people.
“500 excess deaths a week because of its failure to fund the NHS adequately”. “Neoliberals missing the ball”? or clearing the decks?
25,000 excess deaths per year – leaves space for lots of people that want to come to the UK. Oh wait, am I missing something here – the current tory crew want fewer immigrants suggesting no so much “the great replacement” more “the great elimination”. There was an interesting & sad article in the Guardian covering one of the grooming grounds for UK politicos:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/10/musa-okwonga-boys-dont-learn-shamelessness-at-eton-it-is-where-they-perfect-it
Nothing terribly new in the story – but interesting all the same. In a normal society the school would be closed and reduced to rubble, given that we arrived at “500 excess deaths per week” via the playing fields of Eton and the pupils it “educated”. Well done.
I don’t think it is a good tactic comparing their pay as lower than those working in a coffee shop, partly because the facts are dubious and it disparages cafe workers. Don’t think may people in a coffee shop get £30.000 which is a Junior Doctors starting pay. Per hour worked may occasionally or often be true but if Junior Doctors have to work 60 hours+ to get their 30,000 that is what their emphasis should be on imo. Can’t be good having tired Doctors for patients or for the Doctors. . Better conditions, lower working hours, training to become a doctor as a job option being encouraged for school leavers and made more accessible and higher pay. To what level though I am not sure.
https://www.bma.org.uk/pay-and-contracts/pay/junior-doctors-pay-scales/pay-scales-for-junior-doctors-in-england
I would never wish to disparage cafe workers, I’ve total respect for them, I’ve been one, so has my daughter, who is now a junior doctor. With 5 years of intensive training and £80,000 plus of debt, frequent 13 hour shifts, responsibility for very large numbers of patients, especially on nights, one might expect her to earn a little more than £14 per hour now. I would add that they frequently stay on beyond the end of a shift when dealing with complex situations, so rarely work just their allotted hours – dealing with someone in a medical emergency is rather different to putting the froth on your last capucino, and way more emotionally draining. On a weekend she is the lowest paid worker on her ward and that includes nurses and porters who get a preferential rate at such times. The nurses had no idea that she was paid less than them.
Regarding your suggestion for training to be encouraged as a job option for school leavers…. well I think that going to medical school is generally what that’s for!! But you are right …we need to make the conditions more sustainable in order to keep these highly trained and dedicated young people.
A good article about the role of junior doctors in the guardian :
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/13/junior-doctors-backbone-of-hospitals-the-secret-health-boss
Thanks
Richard, what does this mean, please? …”junior doctors are paid less than people in Pret”… people in Pret?? … (am a US American so perhaps it got lost in translation ) Thanks!
Pret-a-Manger, which is a coffee chain
“junior doctors in England will have suffered a 26 per cent real-terms cut to their pay since 2008/09.” Source: https://inews.co.uk/news/how-much-junior-doctors-earn-last-pay-rise-strike-dispute-2204448
If a 28% pay increase was good enough for MPs, then it is good enough for other public sector workers. It would cost taxpayers nothing, because taxes do not pay for government spending.
I can recommend: How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps by Dr Youssef El-Gingihy
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Dismantle-Easy-Steps-second/dp/1789041783/
Watch: The Great NHS Heist https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thegreatnhsheist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro-oU0u8Jos
https://leftfootforward.org/2023/03/anti-privatisation-campaigners-gather-in-london-for-huge-keep-our-nhs-public-demonstration/
Not forgetting this demo on Saturday 11th, which did not get in any of the MSM.
10s of thousands marching for the NHS. Lots of links asking people to join from all the left-wing groups, but no mention of what happened after it happened. I expected to read about it in the i today. One paragraph in the article about the doctors strike, and a photo of a few protesters.
It was mentioned in the Guardian, again just a line in an article on the doctors strike.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/12/junior-doctors-paid-lower-hourly-rate-than-workers-to-get-at-pret
The difference between doctors and Pret is that Pret managers don’t have £100,000 debt before they start earning like some doctors do.