Get behind the resident ‘junior’ doctors’ strikes

Junior doctors on the picket line last year (Picture: Guy Smallman)

Thousands of doctors are set to strike for five days this month in a battle over pay and the future of the NHS. 

The BMA union said resident doctors—formerly known as junior doctors—would walk out on Friday 25 July unless the government agreed to serious talks.

Residents are furious after seeing their pay slashed by 23 percent since 2008.

Health secretary Wes Streeting offered them a rise of just 5.4 percent this year, and no prospect of further rises to make good the difference.

He is demanding doctors back down, saying that the NHS is “hanging by a thread” and that the BMA were threatening its recovery. 

But Anna, a resident doctor in London who qualified four years ago, wasn’t having any of that. “What is actually putting people at risk isn’t our pay,” she told Socialist Worker. “It the underfunded national health service—that’s where the real danger lies.” 

“That’s led to people waiting for hours and hours in A&E, while millions more are waiting for appointments. Yet the government do have the money. If they can increase our defence budget, they can increase the NHS budget.”

And looking back at the previous wave of walkouts, which ended last year, she says striking is “definitely worth it.”

After prolonged strikes, the BMA last year won a deal that was worth an average of 22.3 percent over two years.

But that pay jump was nowhere near enough to make up for the years of losses, said Anna.

“Consultants have posted pictures of their payslips from 2008, when they were newly qualified. I could see that they were taking home the same as what I was in 2021—13 years later,” she said.

Anna pointed out that one of the reasons for the NHS crisis is a lack of qualified staff. She added that years of low pay is driving people out of the service—and stopping new people from joining it. 

“I graduated with tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt,” she said. “And now I’m having to pay all that off, and at very high rates of interest.

“I was lucky, I wouldn’t even have been able to move to the city and start my job without help from my parents. I needed thousands for a landlord’s deposit and a month’s rent in advance. Lots of people don’t have that support.”

Anna is rightly keen to say that all health workers should have better pay, not just doctors.

“I think a lot of people in the public sector are not paid enough—emergency workers, carers, nurses and teachers for example.

“And when you have friends that work in the private sector that are sailing past you without this financial worry, it’s really demoralising.”

Resident doctors are taking on Labour in one of the biggest industrial disputes so far under this government. And the fact that they are fighting Labour, rather than the Tories, could have an impact on levels of public support.

But this doesn’t faze Anna, who says she voted to continue rather than settle last year’s dispute because the offer wasn’t good enough.

“I think the strike will show Labour up for what it really is. I think it’s going to be quite revealing about how far they’ve deviated from their origins and true values,” she said.