THE CLAIM that last week 196,000 hospital appointments were cancelled has been used by the Tories and their supporters in the media to put the blame for the NHS crisis on the backs of junior doctors taking four days of strike action last week.
On Monday, Tory Health Secretary Steve Barclay called the number of cancelled appointments and procedures ‘deeply disappointing’ and blamed the strike for ‘hampering’ efforts by the government to cut NHS waiting lists.
Attempting to portray the Tories as ‘reasonable’ Barclay said: ‘We remain ready to start formal talks with the BMA as soon as the union pauses its strike and moves significantly from its unrealistic position of demanding a 35% pay increase.’
Barclay’s comments drew an immediate response from Dr Vivek Trivedi and Dr Robert Laurenson, the co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors committee who said junior doctors are well aware of waiting lists and their impact on patients but: ‘These millions of patients are not in this position because of strikes though. Persistent under-resourcing of the health service and under-valuing staff – exacerbated by a pandemic – mean we simply don’t have the workforce and capacity to provide the high-quality care that patients need and deserve.’
Responding to Barclay’s claim that he ‘recognised’ the ‘significant pay pressure and workforce pressure’ which is why he wants to ‘to sit down with them’ they pointed out that everything Barclay has done shows the exact opposite. Barclay refuses to enter into any negotiations until the BMA drops ‘our opening position of calling for a reversal of the pay erosion experienced by junior doctors’.
The Tories are demanding the BMA surrenders completely, and the only talks they will contemplate will be to inform the union that British capitalism cannot afford anything more than a derisory pay increase that will further erode the pay for junior doctors and drive thousands more out of the NHS.
Junior doctors’ real-terms pay has been eroded by 26% since 2008, and the 35% being claimed will only return them to these levels given the headline rate of inflation which is currently over 10%.
What is clear, is that the Tories are not going to negotiate anything with public sector unions – who are now firmly in line for a confrontation with a Tory government armed with anti-union laws which make striking illegal.
While the unions are asking for talks, the Tories are preparing for a showdown to force workers to accept being driven into poverty to rescue the profits of the bosses and bankers.
The claim that workers’ wages are responsible for embedding inflation and therefore must be cut has been constantly pushed by the Tories and the Bank of England – and accepted as gospel by the Labour Party. In fact, while workers are having their pay cut the bosses are making huge profits with no demand placed on them to ‘share the pain’ of inflation.
This week, the Unite union published a report commissioned by them on the profits made by the UK’s biggest listed companies that showed the profit margins of FTSE 350 had jumped 89% in 2021 compared to 2019 because of ‘profit gouging’.
Yesterday, the consumer organisation Which? revealed that supermarket prices have soared by 17.2% with the cost of staples like cheese, bread and oats going up by an astronomical 80%.
These increases are the result of price gouging, where the supermarkets, energy giants and all the companies in between drive their prices above even the recognised inflation rate to make super-profits for the bosses and millions in dividend handouts to their shareholders.
Meanwhile, millions of workers struggle to feed their children and heat their homes while the Tories blame them for inflation and demand even greater sacrifices. The working class is refusing to passively accept being driven into poverty while the bosses and bankers reap massive profits.
On May 1st, hundreds of thousands of workers will join with nurses and Unite health workers who are striking on May Day.
The central demand of this action must be to force the TUC to immediately call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
