Hunt’s test of purpose

THE junior doctors are now testing public sympathy to breaking point. For although most people have the highest respect for the medical profession, it is hard to see how today’s withdrawal for the first time of cover from accident and emergency, maternity and intensive care units can be interpreted as anything other than highly political.

This strike, so contrary to the sense of vocation which impels people to become doctors in the first place, is unprecedented in the history of the NHS.

It springs from the determination of the Left-wing- dominated British Medical Association to demonstrate that it, rather than the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is really in charge.

Patients have long known it is not a good idea to get seriously ill at the weekend. That is one reason why this Government was elected less than a year ago on a promise to bring in a seven-daya-week health service. Mr Hunt must now stand firm as he seeks to implement this pledge. To yield to the BMA activists, as they incite their members to ever more dangerous forms of protest, would be a betrayal not just of the cause of public- sector reform, but of the NHS itself. THE Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, is reported to be planning a U-turn on the decision to turn all schools into academies, to mollify councillors, including many Conservatives. We thought the whole idea of the academies programme was to liberate schools from local authority control, and we trust Mrs Morgan does not forget that.