The junior doctors strike is out and out greed – we’ll be lucky to get through coming days without unnecessary deaths

THREE years ago, millions of Britons turned out on their doorsteps every Thursday evening to clap NHS staff.

 It was a gesture which recognised the efforts that so many doctors and nurses had put in during the pandemic.

There won’t be so many people who would feel like clapping junior doctors this evening.

We are now two days into a three-day strike which has led to yet more operations being cancelled — on top of the 1.1million already delayed this year.

Some A&E departments have been forced to close. All this at a time of year when demand for medical help is ­especially high thanks to the cold, damp weather and a greater number of ­accidents on dark, sometimes icy, roads.

 There is some emergency cover being provided by senior doctors, who have been tempted — with large bonuses — to fill their junior colleagues’ shoes.

But even so, we will be extremely lucky to get through the next few days without unnecessary deaths.

The disruption to services may also mean large numbers of patients being unable to go home for Christmas, and ­facing spending the festive season on the wards.

Out and out greed

And junior doctors won’t be finished with strike action when they return to work on Saturday morning. They are planning a further six-day walkout in January — right at the usual peak of the flu season.

Doctors deserve to be well-paid, but not to the point of driving the public finances even deeper into the red.

 Junior doctors have already been offered a three per cent rise, on top of the ­average 8.8 per cent they have already had this year. Given that inflation is running at 3.9 per cent, that is an extremely ­generous deal, yet junior doctors are ­having none of it.

The British Medical Association — which is just a trade union, in spite of its grand name — is holding out for a massive rise of as much as 35 per cent.

 That is more than just a cheeky demand. It is out and out greed, which shows blatant disregard for the state of the public finances, shattered as they are by the Covid pandemic on top of years of poor fiscal discipline. The BMA claims that it needs a rise of close to 35 per cent to restore pay, in real terms, to what it was in 2008 — at the peak, incidentally, of Gordon Brown’s irresponsible spending splurge which ended nearly bankrupting the government.

 But, in any case, it is a false claim.

 In coming up with its high pay claim figure, the BMA used the Retail Prices Index — a measure which has long since been dropped as an official statistic because of faulty methodology.

The BMA has also spun the yarn that junior doctors are only being paid £14.09 an hour — less than a barista making ­coffee at Pret. Needless to say, this is a great big fib. While a barista at Pret can theoretically earn £14.10 an hour when bonuses are included, the BMA ignored altogether the generous bonuses which are paid to junior doctors.

NHS figures show that, in the year to June 2023, a junior doctor in the first year of training earned mean basic pay of £28,225 for a 40-hour week.

 When you add on £8,358 of extra payments for shift working, geographical-based weightings and so on, they were earning £36,583.

 And that is just in the first year, when doctors are still being trained.

 By the second year, they are on an average of £43,115.

 Find me a branch of Pret which offers that sort of money to its baristas. It would have a queue of job applicants which stretched round the block.

Survey after survey has shown that, of all courses you can study at university, it is graduates who studied medicine who have the highest earnings.

 Five years after graduation, those who have a medical degree are earning an average of £47,100.

 Stay the course and, after a few years more, many junior doctors will have made their way to being consultants, earning an average of £128,998 a year.

Socialist revolution

I can sympathise with ordinary junior doctors who think they have a raw deal.

 Who doesn’t sometimes feel like that?

 If they have their minds concentrated on the job, they might not realise how good their pay is, nor how much many of their contemporaries are struggling financially.

But I can’t forgive the militants at the BMA who have talked their members into these highly damaging strikes.

 In recent years, the junior doctors’ section of the union has been taken over by the far Left, which cares more about taking on the Government than about the wellbeing of doctors.

It used to be manual workers who downed tools at the drop of a hat and stood around a brazier while their leaders plotted socialist revolution.

Now, the most militant unions are those who represent some of the best-paid in society: from train drivers on £65,000 basic pay to consultants on nearly double that.

Meanwhile, the people who have to pick up the bill for inflation-busting pay rises are ordinary workers who earn far less than the militants.

 Of course, most junior doctors do vital work and do it very diligently.

But there are plenty of other essential workers out there who work extremely hard for much less money.

 It is time the BMA’s militants stopped taking taxpayers for goons.