MILITANT DOCTORS’ UNION IS A DISGRACE — SO I’M QUITTING
BRIMMING with indignation, one junior doctor on the picket line tried to justify her participation in yesterday’s strike. The dispute was not about personal gain, said Dr Nadia Masood, but about the future of the NHS. ‘It is a public service and we want to keep it safe,’ she claimed.
Well, she and her colleagues chose a strange way of fulfilling that goal. In a bizarre inversion of logic, they decided to demonstrate their supposedly profound concern for healthcare by leaving their posts, abandoning patients and plunging the NHS into immediate crisis.
But that contradiction just illustrates the hollowness of the strikers’ rhetoric about safeguarding the health service. The reality is that this bout of industrial action, which looks like escalating next week, is driven not by compassion but by a mix of politics and greed.
Beyond all the sentimental propaganda about doctors, this strike has actually been created by the British Medical Association’s ruthless exploitation of its monopoly position to protect outdated working practices, halt vital reforms, boost its members’ pay and, above all, damage the democratically elected Government of this country. Altruism does not enter into it. During one maritime strike in 1966, Labour prime minister Harold Wilson famously condemned the malignant influence of a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated’ union bosses who refused to be ‘realistic and reasonable’.
Half a century later, exactly the same language could be used about the leaders of the BMA, whose contempt for the needs of patients is an affront to the basic ethics of the medical profession.
As a former medical practitioner and senior BMA figure myself, I have been disgusted by the recent antics of this body. Now that it has become embroiled in Left-wing politics and manufactured grievances, it is not the same organisation that I was once proud to serve.
In recognition of that service, particularly my involvement with committees in London and Wales, I was elected a Fellow of the BMA in 1998.
It was a proud moment for me. But today, I can no longer support an irresponsible association which, for the sake of narrow ideology and self-serving financial interests, deliberately encourages its members to neglect their essential duties.
In fact, I am so repelled by the behaviour of the association that, with regret, I have decided to return my certificate of Fellowship to the BMA office in Wales.
I feel that I had no alternative for this action. The current strike cannot be justified on any grounds whatsoever.
AT the heart of the dispute is the Government’s push to introduce seven-day working in the NHS, a perfectly laudable aim given the current significantly higher rates of mortality at the weekend.
To spread the workload across seven days without massively increasing costs, the Department of Health will have to alter some staffing arrangements, such as the current high premiums they pay for weekend shifts.
But, contrary to what the BMA claims, junior doctors are not under attack because of these changes. Quite the opposite is true. The maximum number of hours to be worked by junior doctors is actually to be reduced from 91 a week to 72, thereby improving patient safety, while basic earnings are to rise by 11 per cent, far beyond the rate of inflation.
Indeed, the government claims 75 per cent of junior doctors are likely to better off and only one per cent of them – made up of those who currently fulfil a heavy weekend load – will see any reductions in pay.
There is, of course, room for negotiation on the detail of reform, about which the Government has already proved flexible. But instead of embarking on serious talks, the BMA has wilfully chosen the path of confrontation.
Its bullish stance is partly a legacy of the years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, whose administrations, desperate for the support of NHS professionals, proved the softest of touches when it came to surrendering to BMA demands. This not only fuelled the BMA’s belief that it could easily get its own way, but also fed a culture of entitlement, where doctors were encouraged to think that the NHS should be built around their own interests rather than those of the patients.
That was seen at its worst in the notorious GP contract of 2004, which achieved the remarkable feat of increased pay for reduced hours. Other measures contributed to this culture, like the EU’s Working Time Directive and the failure to stop consultants dictating their own work cycles.
As a result, the medical profession has badly lost its way. Although most doctors still work hard, the traditional spirit of self-sacrifice has increasingly been diluted by an attitude of selfinterest, characterised by lack of cooperation and clock watching.
It is now almost unheard- of for a family doctor to provide a weekend or out- of-hours service, while I have known cases of junior doctors who have walked out in the middle of operations because their stipulated hours had been completed.
I myself suffered a case of medical negligence arising from a spinal injury, during which the defendant’s lawyer said the consultant had not visited me after the operation because such a duty ‘is not in his contract’. In fact, I learnt this consultant never carried out ward rounds at all because he was not contractually obliged to do so.
The problem is compounded by the lack of effective clinical training for junior doctors and nurses. Thanks to the fashionable emphasis on academic instruction, these professionals tend to learn about illnesses from the book rather than the bedside.
In practice, this means they suffer from both an inadequate understanding of medical realities and a poor grasp of the patient experience. That surely explains why the slogan-chanting picket line warriors can be so careless about their responsibilities towards patients. A lack of exchange with them has bred indifference. On a deeper level, politics also plays its nasty part. The BMA was once a professional body to protect the rights of its members.
But now it has transmuted into a highly partisan, heavily politicised body which regards opposition to the Tories as one of its central tasks. ‘A victory for the junior doctors would signify the first real crack in the entire edifice of austerity in the UK,’ said senior BMA spokesman Yannis Gourtsoyannis, as if the challenge to the Government’s economy policy were part of the association’s role.
I have to admit that the junior doctors’ sections of the BMA was always the most militant part of the organisation, but at least in the past it was held in check by the wider membership. Now the picture is transformed, with much of the BMA hierarchy joining in this posturing.
As the organisation turns into a Left-wing pressure group, its strikers even appeal to Labour activists and trade unionists to join them on the picket lines. The election of the ultraradical Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader seems only to have given new impetus to this process of politicisation. ‘We can beat the Tories and make this country great again,’ tweeted BMA council member David Wrigley after Corbyn’s triumph.
Another senior BMA member, Dr Kailash Chand, has even delighted in saying that Tory ‘lies’ about the NHS would make Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels proud.
THE BMA should remember that the Conservatives have a democratic mandate to govern Britain. Reform of the NHS, including weekend working, was a key part of their election-winning manifesto last year.
At present, in mounting its challenge to the Government, the association is relying on the affection in which doctors are held by the British public. But as the dispute worsens and more patients are neglected, that affection could evaporate.
Support for the current dispute would then rapidly turn into outrage at professional, politically motivated blackmail orchestrated by the BMA and its increasingly militant members.
Russell Hopkins is a former chairman of the BMA Welsh Council