We must not go back to business as usual once this dispute is settled. The healthcare service desperately needs root-and-branch reform
Industrial action looks set to define the Sunak Administration as much as it defined Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government in the 1970s.
We may not have reached the extremes of the gravediggers’ strike, but perceptions change and, relatively speaking, we’re facing as tumultuous a period of unrest as we’ve experienced for decades. When you grow accustomed to a broadly peaceful industrial landscape, strikes by rail workers, teachers and nurses within a few weeks of each other can make it feel like 1926 all over again.
It was Aneurin Bevan who boasted of “stuffing the doctors’ mouths with gold”, and today it is the junior doctors who are set to reject a pay increase of up to £7,000 from the Government. Though the debate usually focuses on the staff, it is patients who are first in line to suffer when disruption in the wards drags on. Perhaps the Hippocratic Oath needs to be rewritten: Do no harm, provided we’re paid enough.
The political challenge for the Prime Minister is not greatly dissimilar to the one that faced Callaghan when the trade unions who claimed to be his allies turned on him. Then, unions effectively ushered in nearly two decades of Thatcherism as punishment for his lack of generosity. This time, the unions might be better disposed to the arrival of Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street, but if they imagine that as Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves will be more profligate than Jeremy Hunt, then they may be disappointed.