There are thousands of trained doctors in the UK right now — unemployed. Not because they're unnecessary. Not because there's no demand. But because the government refuses to fund the NHS roles we desperately need.
In this video, Richard Murphy explains how government austerity, fiscal dogma, and a fundamental misunderstanding of money are forcing young doctors out of medicine — and even out of the country — while people are left waiting for treatment.
If we have the doctors, we can fund the doctors. So why won't they?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
One of the things that I often talk about on this channel is that it is the job of a government to use all the resources that are available to it so that the people of the country that they govern get the services that they need within the constraints that exist, using the power of the government to create money to deliver this outcome. If you want to summarise the whole of my political thought, I've just put it in one sentence: that is it.
I do believe it is the job of government to be the servant of people, and to meet need, and right now, I can give a very real example of why this is failing.
Inside the NHS at this very moment, there are doctors being made redundant, by choice, by the government, as a consequence of cuts that it is imposing upon hospitals. Young doctors are not being given the training posts that they need to further their careers and are instead being made redundant in their thousands because the government has decided it will not fund their development in hospitals or in GP practices, even though there are people crying out for care, appointments and quite literally treatments that will otherwise be unavailable.
This is not made up. This is fact. This is documented.
There are GPs who have no work.
There are hospital trainees who are being sacked.
There are resident doctors who cannot make career progression and so are going abroad.
And this is all as a consequence of choice, and it is as a consequence of the choice of the government to impose austerity on the NHS.
When you hear people like our Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, saying, "We'll have to wait to train new doctors," he's talking utter nonsense. We don't need to train new doctors at this moment in this country to get more doctors to work. There are thousands of them looking for work who can't get it with the only potential employer they've got, which is the NHS, because the government will literally not part with the cash.
But the cash is available. I keep on explaining that. The government can create the money in this country to employ people, to deliver services if the resources to do that activity exist. And by definition, if there are unemployed doctors, those resources do exist. Therefore, creating that money to deliver that service to make people better is possible just by literally telling the Bank of England to make payments. And inflation will not arise as a result because these people will first of all be paying tax, and secondly, they will be putting people who are out of work back into work because they will be better, and therefore, in fact, the government will be better off as a result: it's that absurd.
It isn't that the money isn't available because the government can always create the money. It is actually a fact that in this situation if the government did create the money and put people to work as doctors, there would be more money available to the government, and yet they won't make that decision because their dogma is that they must balance their books at a particular point that has been decreed between Rachel Reeves and the Office for Budget Responsibility. They will, as a consequence, do nothing to help you if you need help now.
That's a political choice.
It's a political choice to make you suffer.
It's a political choice chosen because of dogmatic economic and political thinking that says that the government must shrink in size, rather than you should have help when you need it.
It's a political choice to keep people unemployed.
All of those decisions by the government are utterly unacceptable.
This is what a government that does not accept the principles of modern monetary theory does. The modern money system, as I prefer to call it, quite simply says that any government can create the money to put spare resources within its economy to use, and there won't be inflation.
But if it still wants to put resources to use and there could be a risk of inflation, it could increase tax as a consequence to reallocate resources to the essential task, taking them away from the non-essential, and there are plenty of activities undertaken in our economy which are not essential, which the government could tackle through the taxation process.
So when the government says, "We'll have to wait seven years to get another doctor," it's lying.
They're quite literally driving Uber cabs at the moment.
They're quite literally queuing up to move abroad.
They're quite literally sitting around wondering what the heck to do with their lives when they've got £100,000 in student debt and have just been made redundant two or three years after they started their hospital training.
This is what callousness looks like.
This is what incompetence looks like.
This is what the failure to understand economics looks like.
This is what the failure to understand money looks like.
This is what happens when politicians don't care and neglect to explain to people why they're making the decisions that they're doing, and in this case, their neglect is to tell you they don't want you to have what you need.
We have people running this country who don't care, and to me, that matters.
I could deliver a better health service for you and not punish anyone as a consequence or risk inflation in any slight way at all as a result.
We could quite literally have the care that we need, but this government won't supply it. And for that, they deserve to be voted out of office whenever the opportunity comes because governments that don't care don't deserve votes.
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Wes Streeting has now accepted nearly half a million pounds in personal donations from private healthcare providers.
https://goodlawproject.org/health-secretary-keeps-taking-donations-linked-to-private-health/
Why is he not asked about this in every interview?
When I was in medical school in the 1990s the student intake was matched to the available positions and all the students who passed finals were guaranteed jobs.
Richard
I am old enough to remember reading in the 70’s about the PIT – pool of inactive teachers. You may well remember this.
This had come about as a result of the raising of the school leaving age meaning an increased demand for teachers
So what about the
PID Doctors
PIN Nurses
PIB Builders
etc?
Al people whose skills we need
That of course means not only getting many people back to the careers they trained for BUT in a lot of cases – nurses, builders, teachers, vets etc addressing why they left in the first place
MMT makes it clear that all those people could be delivering for us, if only we understood money. There is a point coming, very shortly.
Just watched Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart (The Rest is Politics) claiming that MMT is dangerous populism and that we can’t afford to keep increasing Government Debt because the interest payments are already at a crippling level . . .
It would make you weep.
Indeed
It would be fun to be invited on
I fear that their cognitive dissonance would be frustrating and goading in the extreme Richard. I can’t see either of them seriously engaging.
You might just as well talk to the wall.
High time MPs rebelled and forced Reeves to give in. And at the very least, surely what you say here could be said by MPs of all parties in the House, repeatedly, so that everybody hears the truth.
Clueless Streeting is being advised by the useless Milburn repeating the mistakes Milburn made when he was in post.
This time the brief includes ” we can’t afford it”.
Utter rubbish of course.
I am left with the impression that no steer/the robot and the genius are intent of gutting the NHS, local government because as clueless repeats the system is broken and then continues to break the NHS.
The UK is facing a health system when most of us will not be able to pay the insurance premiums.
Streeting is showboating for his bid to replace no steer.
In my book Wes Streeting is beneath contempt….ever more so with each successive utterance he comes out with. What health sectretary with an iota of sense or sanity would want to alienate the medical staff of the NHS.
For me this is personal. My daughter and her husband are both junior doctors, currently working in Australia for 18 months after completing 7 years of training, taking an opportunity to travel a little and save up to start a family. Interestingly they don’t love the Australian medical system for a number of reasons and much prefer to be working in the NHS. My daughter came top in her year at uni, has amazing references and is currently working in a cardio thoracic intensive care unit, revising for yet another exam which will determine her eligibility for the training place she’s applying for to start next August. She’s extremely pessimistic about her chances which seems insane given her track record. It breaks my heart to think that both I and the health sevice might lose her to another country.
Thank you for relating, and good luck to your daughter
I have a wife with six postgraduate medical qualifications: I have some idea of the stress.
Totally agree,but I believe we also have thousands of newly qualified nurses, paramedics etc unable to get jobs because of recruitment freezes and I know locally we have laid off teachers and due to falling rolls and funding crises there are unemployed teachers.
It is madness that due to arbitrary rules many public services are struggling whilst suitable staff are unemployed.
Equally crazy is the laying off of thousands of experienced NHS administrators to apparently focus on frontline workers. These clinical staff will now be spending more time in administration when we need to utilise their clinical skills.
Much to agree with, including the last para.
Agreed.
This is what happens when you are obsessed with money. The only thing you need to do with money apparently is to get more out of………..er, money – savings, profit – all in monetary terms, nothing else.
As a rail enthusiast, I thank my quaint old hobby with giving me many insights over the years.
These days we associate the word ‘redundancy’ with the effects on human beings of crap industrial policy and state sanctioned theft. But redundancy was also about ‘spare capacity’ that could be used at short notice to keep systems moving.
On the railways this is why you had locomotives and rolling stock and even breakdown and derailment trains hanging around the country just in case. Over the years, the depots these spares hung around have been sold off to earn money for shareholders or to cut expenses. There’s no where to keep it. So it went for scrap. And now, your train service has no safety net which means more cancellations , and breakdown and recovery services arrive by ……….road.
The same idea of redundancy – the capacity to absorb the unexpected – applies to all services I think – the NHS too.
I remember well staffed wards in hospitals. Then I remember people – the ‘great British public’ moaning about staff ‘hanging around’ as they waited, as many drunk the Thatcherite Kool-Aid and became ‘rational experts’ about efficiency because they were told that they were ‘customers’ now.
And now, there aren’t enough staff at all. Have the people of this country then got what they wanted at last? And BTW, I never wanted that.
Has the great British public ever considered that they have been had? You lot of suckers, you?
You knew I would agree with you
You are right, of course
I remember many years ago as a young manager responsible for a profit centre in a company the owner of the company said to me ‘always have one more man than you think you need’. It took a while for the wisdom of this to sink in but the positive impact of the ‘one more man’ was remarkable.
The one thing this country badly needs is a politician with the courage to say the country needs to rethink how its monetary and economic system works before there’s major unrest here. How such a politician points this out is critical!
It will involve pointing out then when a politician says the following:-
“One of the great debates of our time is about how much of your money should be spent by the State and how much you should keep to spend on your family. Let us never forget this fundamental truth: the State has no source of money other than money which people earn themselves. If the State wishes to spend more it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. It is no good thinking that someone else will pay—that “someone else” is you. There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.”
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document%2F105454
They have a moral obligation to point out where the money we use as a unit of account and a medium of exchange actually comes from to pay taxes and allow saving.
There has to be a reason for this lack of morals. Stephanie Kelton, the American professor of economics, started on the road to pointing this out in the exchange of emails you had with her in 2015 Richard. She said many people tacitly (unthinkingly) believe money grows on rich people:-
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2015/08/13/money-does-not-grow-on-rich-people/
But where can this belief ultimately stem from when the only coherent reality is that modern money creation has to be by both licenced banks and by government with the later in dominant position because it can create money in the first instance debt free whereas the former can only create it with debt attached.
The most logical answer is that market capitalism engenders a political mindset of Libertarianism which is constantly pumped out by newspapers owned by the rich and politicians willing to shill for the rich by promoting it. This mindset is that government is an obstacle to people wanting the freedom to pursue their lives as they individually see fit. Allowing government anywhere near creating money is a recipe for denying this freedom.
The brave politician will be the one who can cogently explain why we have to have limits on freedom!
Behind almost every phone-app taxi steering wheel is a story the government dont want you to hear, about the mess we are in.
The gig economy, unemployment, immigration, foreign policy, the NHS, Welfare, homelessness, gross inequality – its all there.
Agreed
We had a brilliant young doctor at my local surgery last year. He gave me some advice that literally changed my life.
He had to leave because there was no job for him.
I hope he is still helping people somewhere.
The nurse who has worked there for 20 years said he was the best doctor she had ever known.
I am reminded of the ton of nonsense emanating from a harrumphing Tory MP on Question Time when Thatcher was PM: “We need real jorbs, not phoney jorbs.”
Funnily enough I thought Rory Stewart was a bit unsettled by his 4.5 hours study of MMT. I thought he might briefly have been thinking back to his role in the Osborne austerity project with some alarm. He got over that moment though but a crack in the edifice appeared.
Current spending is presumed to be ‘tax, then spend’. In reality it’s ‘spend, then tax’.
They are going anti-clockwise [turning back time], when they should be going clockwise which is what MMT does.
Before some wizz (like yesterday) starts asking you where you get your “thousands of doctors looking for work” from, it’s here –
https://dauk.org/glut-of-unemployed-and-underemployed-gps-ready-to-work/
Thanks
@Julian Smith
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/12/05/why-is-the-government-sacking-doctors/comment-page-1/#comment-1057084
It doesn’t make me weep. It cheers me up no end.
The truth is out there.
It scares them.
They aren’t ignoring it.
That’s GOOD news.
I have been able to talk about MMT to 3 friends in past 2 days. They had open minds & were interested. The opening in both cases was NHS crisis.
Thanks
The title of this post is a question, and its a good one.
I like questions, and Aas the MMT weather is changing (we’re being attacked which is GOOD news), I think we need to add a new weapon to the armoury, which is short, awkward polemic questions that trip up our opponents.
Like:
who made the biscuits?
Where does the money we pay taxes come from?
How long can we run a surplus UK budget before ALL the money disappears into the Treasury?
Why do wealthy people and companies get more tax relief than poor people?
Who invented fiscal rules?
Has a budget forecast EVER been right?
Was George Osborne lying when he admitted that austerity wasn’t necessary?
What are the figures for?
– criminal income tax evasion
– criminal business tax evasion,
– ditto for tax avoidance
– criminal intentional benefit fraud
– DWP unintentional overpayments
– unclaimed benefits and pensions
Put these neoliberal apologists on the back foot. Make THEM explain themselves.
Thanks
Richard, can you please clarify whether this situation is confined to NHS England or whether the same situation exists in Scotland. When the phrase “the NHS” is used, the fact that NHS Scotland is separate and differently organised from, NHS England tends to be ignored.
This is the NHS in England – which is what Streeting is responsible for. Health is devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of 2025 hospitalised in NHS Scotland hospitals. One of the things that struck me was the number of English doctors and nursing staff who work in Scottish hospitals, but then NHS Scotland has acted more sensibly in relation to salaries than the NHS in England, so it’s really no surprise that recently qualified English medical staff have opted to come north for work. Meanwhile, recently qualified Scottish medical staff are still being drawn to Canada. This has been going on since at least as far back as the 1950s, the attractions being better salaries, the very considerable Scottish population in Canada (home from home) and an escape from UK governments which continue to this day to treat Scotland as a colony.
Thanks Ken.
I hope you are getting better.
Thanks for your kind words, Richard. Results so far are encouraging, so fingers are being kept crossed.
Re my cryptic comment about Scotland being treated as a colony, a classic recent example is Ed Milliband’s UK Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund where Scotland’s share of the total fund of £360 million amounts to a mere £28 million (less than 8%). However the Scottish fleet’s landings in 2024 account for 63% of total UK value and 58% by weight. The 8% granted looks for all the world to be based on relative populations, which clearly have nothing to do with relative fleet sizes and landings. The reaction of the Scottish fishing community is predictably enraged. How this will play out remains to be seen, but its impact on the Independence Overton Window is predictable: what’s the point of being in a so-called union when one of Scotland’s largest industries is treated so disparagingly?
What dies it reveal? Three things. Bias. Unconscious bias. Indifference. And that is typical.
On the basis that no question is too stupid to ask out loud….
“This is not made up. This is fact. This is documented.” I was wondering if you could point me to some of that data? And is there data on the costs of getting these doctors back into the NHS quickly and improving retention? (Presumably, simply rehiring them on a higher wage won’t be sufficient, because they would be right back into the old working conditions. (There needs to be a better short-term plan to deal with workload. That might mean, for example, having to re-employ retired doctors part time, for example).
GV
Others did it. Just read the comments.
And, if you know the answers why are you asking me? Your comment carries all the characteristics of trolling.