Wes Streeting says strikes by resident doctors have cost country £3bn over past 3 years as fresh walkout starts
Good morning. Resident doctors in English hospitals started a six-day strike at 7am this morning. Many of them will continue to work, but there will be enough of them joining the strike to have a significant impact on the care hospitals can deliver. It is the 15th resident doctors (who used to be known as junior doctors) have been on stage since they launched a campaign in 2023 to get their pay back to the equivalent level it used to be before austerity kicked in after the financial crash.
This morning Wes Streeting, the health secretary, deployed a new statistic in his PR battle against the BMA, the doctors’ union organised the strikes. He confirmed a figure highlighted in the Daily Mail’s splash saying strikes by resident doctors have now cost the country £3bn.
In an interview with the Today programme, asked if that was an official government figure, Streeting replied:
double quotation mark We think that strikes cost £50m a day. And so that is, an accurate reflection of the cost of these strikes.
But, when it was put to him the BMA is saying that £3bn is about what it would have cost to give the resident doctors the pay rise they are demaning, Streeting would not accept this. He replied:
double quotation mark What is true is that in order to deliver a full pay restoration back to 2008 levels, using the RPI account of inflation, it would cost in the order of £3bn a year.Let’s then assume that other NHS staff would understandably demand the same. Then that cost would be more like £30bn a year. That is more than the entire cost of the Ministry of Justice’s entire budget for running the criminal justice system.
Now, this goes to the heart of the intransigence of the BMA. Despite being the biggest winner by a country mile of public sector pay increases – since this government came in, 28.9% is what they got from us – within weeks of taking office, they still went out on strike.
Andrew Gregory and Peter Walker have more from what Streeting has been saying about the strike here.
I will post more from Streeting’s broadcast interviews this morning shortly.
Here is the agenda for the day.
7am: Resident doctors started a six-day strike in England. (Rather, some of them did – in the past, many doctors have chosen to work rather than to join the BMA strike.)
9.15am: John Swinney, SNP leader and Scottish first minister, holds a campaign event focused on fuel prices. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, is holding a campaign event focused on pothole policy (at 9.30am), and Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative leader, is launching his manifesto (at 2pm).
Morning: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is campaigning in Newcastle.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
12.30pm: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding a press conference in Warwickshire.
Afternoon: Military planners from around 35 countries interested in plans to keep the strait of Hormuz open after the Iran war ends meet to discuss options at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, north-west London.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Labour dismisses Reform UK’s slavery reparations announcement as ‘desperate gimmick’
The Labour party has described Reform UK’s reparations announcement (see 9.56am) as “a desperate gimmick”. A Labour spokesperson said:
double quotation mark This is a desperate gimmick from Reform that would do nothing to restore order and control to Britain’s borders.That’s this Labour government’s focus and that’s why we are taking decisive action to tackle surges in asylum claims by imposing an emergency brake on study and work visas from countries abusing the system, slashing £1bn from the asylum support bill, and halving the length of refugee protection to 30 months.
Nobody will take Nigel Farage seriously on this when his party is full of opportunistic Tories who failed on immigration when they were in government.
Reform UK would stop visas for people from countries seeking slavery reparations
Eric Williams, who wrote a landmark history of the slave trade and who subsequently became the first prime minister of Trindad and Tobago after indepndence, once famously wrote:
double quotation mark British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery merely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.
He died in 1981 but he might have been gratified to learn that, more than 40 years on, his insight remains as valid as ever – at least judging by what Reform UK is up to today.
Slavery reparations are not a pressing issue in UK politics; given that none of the mainstream parties as ever proposed paying reparations, they should not even make the top 100 as a matter of pressing political dispute. But they are powerful ammunition for the right in the culture wars, and fail-safe clickbait, and today Reform UK is announcing that, if it were in government, it would refuse to issue visa to countries demaning reparations from the UK. Jamie Grierson has the details.
While the mainstream parties do not back reparations, the Green party is in favour. After the UN general assembly passed a resolution last month condemning slavery as a crime against humanity, the Green party issued a statement saying:
double quotation mark Many Green party activists have over the years been working hard towards establishing Reparative Justice in the UK and this United Nations motion will go a long way in supporting the global reparations movement.It is not just problematic, but deeply sad that the countries most involved in the trans-Atlantic trafficking of African people were the countries to either vote against, or abstain from the motion, giving underhanded, loophole excuses to fight against accountability.
Streeting accuses BMA of hypocrisy, saying it’s giving its staff pay rise well below what resident doctors offered
In his interviews this morning Wes Streeting, the health secretary, accused the BMA of hypocrisy over pay because the organisation is offering its own staff far less than the resident doctors are demanding.
He told BBC Breakfast:
double quotation mark And here’s the real kicker; having rejected this deal because the pay offer apparently wasn’t good enough at 4.9%, the BMA are offering their own staff 2.75% on affordability grounds.Why does the BMA think they can get away with telling their own staff they only get 2.75% because that’s all they can afford, whilst rejecting a 4.9% offer because that’s all the government can afford.
It seems to me, the BMA aren’t willing to put their hands in their own pockets to pay their own staff, but they’re very happy to try and fleece your viewers, asking them to pay even more in tax than I think this country can afford.
He made the same point in an interview on Today, explaining what the BMA was doing and adding: “There’s a word for that.”
In a separate interview on the Today programme, Jack Fletcher, chair of its resident doctors committee, said that he was not responsible for what the BMA paid its staff and that he supported their right to go on strike.
Wes Streeting says strikes by resident doctors have cost country £3bn over past 3 years as fresh walkout starts
Good morning. Resident doctors in English hospitals started a six-day strike at 7am this morning. Many of them will continue to work, but there will be enough of them joining the strike to have a significant impact on the care hospitals can deliver. It is the 15th resident doctors (who used to be known as junior doctors) have been on stage since they launched a campaign in 2023 to get their pay back to the equivalent level it used to be before austerity kicked in after the financial crash.
This morning Wes Streeting, the health secretary, deployed a new statistic in his PR battle against the BMA, the doctors’ union organised the strikes. He confirmed a figure highlighted in the Daily Mail’s splash saying strikes by resident doctors have now cost the country £3bn.
In an interview with the Today programme, asked if that was an official government figure, Streeting replied:
double quotation mark We think that strikes cost £50m a day. And so that is, an accurate reflection of the cost of these strikes.
But, when it was put to him the BMA is saying that £3bn is about what it would have cost to give the resident doctors the pay rise they are demaning, Streeting would not accept this. He replied:
double quotation mark What is true is that in order to deliver a full pay restoration back to 2008 levels, using the RPI account of inflation, it would cost in the order of £3bn a year.Let’s then assume that other NHS staff would understandably demand the same. Then that cost would be more like £30bn a year. That is more than the entire cost of the Ministry of Justice’s entire budget for running the criminal justice system.
Now, this goes to the heart of the intransigence of the BMA. Despite being the biggest winner by a country mile of public sector pay increases – since this government came in, 28.9% is what they got from us – within weeks of taking office, they still went out on strike.
Andrew Gregory and Peter Walker have more from what Streeting has been saying about the strike here.
I will post more from Streeting’s broadcast interviews this morning shortly.
Here is the agenda for the day.
7am: Resident doctors started a six-day strike in England. (Rather, some of them did – in the past, many doctors have chosen to work rather than to join the BMA strike.)
9.15am: John Swinney, SNP leader and Scottish first minister, holds a campaign event focused on fuel prices. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, is holding a campaign event focused on pothole policy (at 9.30am), and Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative leader, is launching his manifesto (at 2pm).
Morning: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is campaigning in Newcastle.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
12.30pm: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding a press conference in Warwickshire.
Afternoon: Military planners from around 35 countries interested in plans to keep the strait of Hormuz open after the Iran war ends meet to discuss options at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, north-west London.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
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