About The NHS, And So Much More

Owen Jones writes:

If we need a reminder of why we should be focusing fire on the government – not the internal machinations of the opposition – then today is it.

England’s junior doctors have been driven into their first national strike for four decades. 

Usually politicians and the media attempt to unpick the legitimacy of the strike: with 98% of those balloted by the British Medical Association (BMA) having backed a walkout, they daren’t.

A near-unanimous show of support tells us that these pillars of the National Health Service are in a state of revolt, that their morale is catastrophically poor, and that they are extremely determined.

But this isn’t simply about their contracts – the catalyst for the strike.

It’s about the NHS, and so much more.

All of us are indebted to junior doctors: either for our own health and lives, or those of relatives, friends and partners.

They’re not students, who just observe while “qualified” doctors do the hard stuff: they represent one in three medical workers, and the NHS would be finished without them. 

These are people who enter a career with one objective: to care for others. As things stand, they are paid less than many other graduates but work absurdly antisocial hours. 

There cannot be a junior doctor in the country who wants to strike. 

But the government’s new contracts mean our already overworked junior doctors will be compelled to work even more antisocial hours.

That public servants who – in a decent society – should be venerated, have the right to a work-life balance, to spend quality time with their families, should itself be argument enough.

Hands up, though, who wants to be tended to by an overworked, stressed junior doctor with low morale? This is about the safety of millions of people.

No wonder the government is losing the battle for public opinion: one poll suggests that two-thirds of us back the strike if emergency care is still available (which it is). 

But then who would back Jeremy Hunt over virtually the entire workforce of junior doctors?

As it is, nearly half of junior doctors opt not to finish their training after completing the foundation programme. 

Last April, a BMA survey reported that more than four in 10 doctors were reporting low morale, with just 17% describing high or very high morale: it is difficult to see the grounds for any improvement since. 

And now the government is seeking to impose these near-universally rejected contracts without listening to the concerns of overstretched public servants.

But ask a striking junior doctor why they’re taking this action, and you won’t simply hear an eloquent spiel about their contracts. 

It’s the very future of the NHS – which they have committed their lives to – which they fear is at stake.

There are the government’s policies of marketisation and fragmentation – yes, accelerating what previous administrations did – stripping the “national” from NHS. 

The NHS has suffered the longest squeeze in its funding since it was established after the war. Cuts to social care are piling pressure on an already buckling NHS. 

Here was the fear. 

The government has been counting on the fact that their attacks on the NHS are too complicated to be widely understood: after all, their Health and Social Care Act was much longer than the legislation that created the NHS under Aneurin Bevan’s watch in the first place. 

But the workforce is fighting back. At the weekend, student nurses and midwives took to the streets to resist the scrapping of NHS grants.

And so health workers set an example for the rest of us.

No Tory government has ever won a majority on such a low share of the vote. Less than a quarter of eligible voters opted for them.

Do we just placidly accept their ideologically driven desire to drive back the frontiers of the state, to cut and privatise? 

Do we remain passive as they drive through cuts to universal credit which will leave millions of the “hard-working families” they patronise worse off, while they leave young people saddled with debt and stripped of state support; while war is waged against one of those most fundamental needs and rights, housing?

I suggest not.

Where the junior doctors and nurses march, we should follow – and remind the triumphalist Tories they are weaker than they think.