THE British Medical Association (BMA) is calling on the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, to focus his time and attention on offering a deal that will stop Wednesday’s strikes going ahead, rather than making hysterical claims that the strike action will cause the NHS to collapse.
Resident doctors in England are currently being polled on whether an offer Streeting put to them last week is enough to avert this week’s strikes; the results of which are expected today.
The offer, which includes important legislative changes to give priority to UK trained doctors applying for training posts, and repurposes 4,000 existing roles as training posts, does not include any offer on pay, despite Streeting’s previous assurances that restoring resident doctors’ pay to their 2008 levels was “A journey”.
The BMA believes the Health Secretary is being utterly irresponsible in the way he is exploiting patients and public fears and making it seem as though the answer to the crisis he talks about lies solely with resident doctors when it absolutely does not.
BMA resident doctors committee chair Dr Jack Fletcher, said: ‘It is horrible for anyone to be suffering with flu – we are not diminishing the impact of that – but Mr Streeting should not be scaremongering the public into thinking that the NHS will not be able to look after them and their loved ones.
‘He is laying the blame for the failings of the NHS to cope with an outbreak of flu at the feet of resident doctors and yet he is strangely reluctant to turn that concern into action and come to the negotiating table.’
Fletcher emphasised: ‘I will meet with him at any time he asks for to try to agree a deal to avert next week’s strikes. What is cruel and calculated is the way in which the Health Secretary fails to have any engagement with us outside strikes and then comes to us with an offer he knows is poor and expects us to just accept it within 24 hours.
“We do not have to strike next week if he puts an offer on the table that we can accept – not necessarily enough to end the dispute overall, but enough to stop the strike, we will do just that. Instead of offers to extend a mandate and talking of strikes in January, his focus should be on ending strikes altogether and working with resident doctors to do just that. We don’t need sticking plaster fixes; we need workable sustainable solutions.
‘Mr Streeting holds all the cards to both postponing the strike and ending the dispute once and for all, but he seems more interested in political grandstanding and exploiting public fears than he does in doing anything useful that would stop the strikes.’
During strikes, more senior doctors and those not taking industrial action, provide patient care for urgent and emergency services and there is a process in place for doctors to be called back into work should there be a major event or non-strike related emergency of some kind.
However, in light of Streeting’s claims about flu and the impact of strikes on the NHS, the BMA has written to NHS trust leaders to ask them to further ensure they have ‘rescheduled less urgent activity to prioritise the safety of urgent and emergency patient care’.
It is well known fact that millions of workers in the trade unions are in full support of the BMA doctors and their struggle to maintain, defend and develop the life saving capacity of the NHS.
It is a scandal that the TUC has not been recalled by the General Council to bring all sections of the working class out on indefinite general strike action in support of the BMA doctors.
There is no doubt that such a mass strike action would bring down the Starmer Labour government that is supervising the massive cuts in the NHS and in the UK capitalist economy, and place a Workers Government in office, that will nationalise the banks and the major industries and bring in a socialist nationalised and planned economy whose working motto would be ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their need’.
There is no doubt that the British capitalist economy is completely bankrupted and must be replaced by a ‘workers government’ that will nationalise the productive forces and bring in a planned socialist economy.
