IN THE midst of the historic four days of strike action by junior doctors this week, the leadership of the BMA have resorted to appealing to the Tories to ‘come round the table’ at the conciliation service ACAS to broker some compromise over pay.
BMA council chairman, Professor Philip Banfield said: ‘In the face of a constant refusal from the Health Secretary to agree to further talks and put forward a credible offer which could bring an end to the dispute, we believe working with ACAS provides the most realistic chance of a successful outcome to the negotiations.’
Banfield stressed that: ‘The BMA has no preconditions to talks and has consistently sought to negotiate with the government. Restoring junior doctors’ pay should not be an unworkable proposition for talks and through the services of ACAS, we’re offering the government an opportunity to discuss how we get there.’
The Tories answered Banfield’s plea for negotiations through ACAS to settle the strike for a pay increase when Home Office minister Chris Philip, in a tour of the broadcast studios yesterday, insisted that junior doctors must call off all strikes before the Tories would even consider talks with the BMA.
The Tories certainly aren’t going into any negotiations until the BMA surrenders over its strike action and over its demand for a 35% pay increase – a pay increase that the Tories have dismissed as ‘unrealistic’ and unaffordable’.
This is a view that is also shared by Labour leader Keir Starmer who backed the Tories on Wednesday in insisting that a 35% increase is ‘unaffordable’. In fact, a 35% pay increase would only restore junior doctors pay to 2008 levels.
15 years of wage freezes, imposed by successive Tory governments, have cut the real term pay of medics by 26%, while the current headline inflation rate over 10.1% means that far from being unrealistic, 35% is a minimum demand.
In fighting for this increase, junior doctors are fighting not just to preserve their pay levels but fighting for the very existence of the NHS as a publicly funded, free at the point of delivery, health service.
According to the BMA, low pay and appalling working conditions resulting from the massive slashing of NHS funding by Tory imposed austerity cuts, has resulted in four-in-ten doctors planning to leave the NHS.
Junior doctors are fighting on behalf of every worker and every family against a Tory government intent on destroying the NHS and forcing through the complete privatisation of the health service.
The Tories are not interested in negotiations or compromise with the BMA or any union.
Instead, while the union leaders continue to seek arbitration and reasonable settlements, the Tories are laying the groundwork for an all-out war on the unions using the courts and police to enforce the anti-union laws that make striking illegal throughout the public services, including the NHS.
The Tories are preparing for a class war on the unions not conciliation through ACAS. All that these demands for arbitration do, is buy time for the Tories to complete the passage of the anti-union legislation into law.
At the same time, the call has gone out this week from The Daily Telegraph, a reliable source of Tory intentions, for the creation of strike-breaking organisation, along the lines of the ‘The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies’, set up by the Tory government in 1926 to break the General Strike of that year.
While the Tories are preparing to smash strikes, the TUC is burying its head in the sand and carrying on as if nothing is happening. The TUC have not issued a single word of support for the junior doctors’ strike, let alone issue any call for solidarity action.
This inaction in the face of all the Tory attacks on the working class and its unions is a total betrayal.
Immediately, workers must demand that the trade union leaders force the TUC to convene an emergency Congress to organise the massive strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
Only the WRP fights for this programme and policy. Join the WRP and its youth movement, the Young Socialists today, to rapidly build up the revolutionary leadership required to put an end to capitalism and bring in a socialist society!
