We all saw it coming, so why didn’t Labour?
When your only tactic for ending the doctors’ strikes that had plagued the last few months of the last Conservative government was to stuff the medics’ mouths with gold, obviously they were going to come back for more.
And that’s what they’ve done. Now junior doctors – whom we must call ‘resident’ doctors – are threatening to plunge the NHS and its patients into more chaos by voting for six months of strikes in support of demands for a ridiculous 29 per cent pay rise.
These pampered medics claim their take-home pay has been devalued since the financial crash in 2008. But so has everyone else’s. And other public sector workers weren’t placated with a massive 22 per cent pay rise over two years as they were – given freely by the new Labour government last July without any demand for workplace reform in return.
Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting during a visit to the University College London Hospital
The doctors’ trade union, the BMA, are aware that Starmer constantly U-turns and that he usually gives in , writes Tom Harris
The doctors’ trade union, the BMA, are aware that Starmer constantly U-turns and that he usually gives in eventually.
Meanwhile, we have a cohort of Labour ministers brought up on the mother’s milk of NHS worship, and who believe instinctively that not paying junior doctors whatever they want is a betrayal of Nye Bevan’s founding vision. No wonder they’ve been a pushover for the militant BMA leadership so far.
Equally ready to bend the ear of the health secretary Wes Streeting are his parliamentary colleagues, the 300 Labour backbenchers who will happily undermine their own government if doing so makes them feel more virtuous.
Tom Harris served as a Labour MP for Glasgow South from 2001 to 2015
It was hoped by some – and feared by others – that Keir Starmer’s 174-seat majority landslide would allow his government to carry out almost any policy it wished. But after a series of humiliating reversals on the winter fuel payment and, most recently, the collapse of the Government’s welfare reforms, that phalanx of restive Labour MPs is proving an impregnable obstacle to the prime minister’s attempts to govern.
A party that prides itself on its opposition to populism will now only consider approving policies that are themselves regarded in progressive quarters as popular, even if they’re entirely unaffordable.
A 29 per cent pay rise for doctors, even over a couple years as the last hike was, would be impossible at the best of times, but particularly so when a government is straining every sinew not to break its own fiscal rules as public spending escalates. Did no one warn this army of young legislators that governing is harder than it looks from the opposition benches? That it frequently involves standing up to vested interests – yes, even in the NHS.
Did no one bother to tell them that governing sometimes means doing the right thing, even if it’s unpopular?
This latest clash could define this government’s mission and show voters who’s really in charge of the country. But I fear my former party hasn’t the stomach to resist.
Tom Harris is a former Labour MP
