Doctors call off strike in mutiny over risk to lives

THE first five-day junior doctors’ strike was dramatically called off last night after their leader was told that patients’ lives could be at risk.

The British Medical Association agreed to suspend the walkout, which would have caused chaos across the NHS next week.

But the shock announcement only came after junior doctors’ leader, Dr Ellen McCourt, was warned by her own boss that action could endanger lives.

Dr McCourt initially insisted on pressing ahead with the unprecedented strike when she met with senior bosses at NHS England yesterday afternoon.

She only reluctantly agreed to call off the walkout following further pressure from BMA council chairman Dr Mark Porter and other union officials, who feared patients would suffer. It was also claimed last night the BMA acted after being contacted by ‘thousands’ of junior doctors concerned that patient safety would be compromised by the five-day walkout.

The union is still planning to hold other five- day strikes in October, November and December unless the Government backs down over a new contract which would see junior doctors paid less per hour for working weekends.

Yesterday’s intervention is further evidence of a growing split within the union – and across the entire profession – over the strike.

The Mail revealed last week how junior doctors were preparing to stage a wave of fiveday walkouts, every month until Christmas. The first was due to begin on Monday, but there were growing concerns that hospitals had not been given enough warning to arrange cover.

Many junior doctors were reluctant to strike and only a third had actually voted to stage an indefinite programme of walkouts. And this weekend one of the junior doctors’ leaders resigned from the union, accusing her colleagues of ‘disregarding patient safety.’

This fresh wave of strikes – the biggest in the NHS’s history – had been spearheaded by 32-year- old Dr McCourt, an A&E trainee from Hull. Aston- ishingly she seemed to blame NHS managers yesterday for putting patients at risk by not organising themselves ahead of next week’s strike.

In a statement, she said: ‘While the BMA provided more than the required notice, we have taken this decision to ensure the NHS has the necessary time to prepare and to put in place contingency plans to protect patient safety.’

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt welcomed the cancellation of the first wave of the ‘ most extreme strike action in NHS history’. But he said: ‘We mustn’t let it obscure the fact that the remaining planned industrial action is unprecedented in length and severity and will be damaging for patients.’

A Department of Health spokesman said if the BMA was really serious about patient safety it would immediately cancel its remaining plans for industrial action.

Although the first strike has been suspended, NHS leaders said some operations and appointments had already been cancelled in preparation.

The NHS Confederation and The Patients Association both called for renewed negotiations to resolve the impasse.

PUGH IS AWAY

THERE is a scene at the beginning of almost everybody’s favourite film, The Dam Busters. One evening in 1942 a little car draws up outside the home of Barnes Wallis, from which steps a familiar fatherly figure who has been summoned to inspect the throat of a child and the wellbeing of her scientist dad.

It is the family doctor, of course. They gossip, share a cup of tea. He helps to close the black-out curtains before pottering back to his Surrey surgery.

This little incident might as well depict a trip to Mars, so alien it is to the relationship between the medical profession and the British people three-quarters of a century later. Today, one needs to be half-dead to receive a home visit from most local GPs.

Patients are wildly unlikely to have any social relationship with their doctor, one in three of whom was born outside this country. And if a great-grandchild of Barnes Wallis ails in 2016, they may be rushed to hospital past pickets waving ‘Corbyn for PM’ placards, only to find all the doctors on strike.

Sinister

I exaggerate, of course. Decent practitioners, of whom there are many, were as appalled as the rest of us by the prospect of junior doctors’ five-day strikes, the first of which was due to take place next week.

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the General Medical Council, wrote to the BMA, urging against the industrial action, and his intervention must have influenced last night’s belated postponement.

Yet we are still scheduled to witness — perhaps fall victim to — the most serious industrial action in the medical profession’s history, a programme of sustained strikes which NHS chiefs say will prompt 100,000 cancelled operations, and inevitably also some deaths.

The strike leaders justify their actions with precisely the same sententious claptrap that the RMT union excuses rail stoppages: they say they are motivated by concern for the welfare of their passengers — or, in this case, patients.

Nobody is expected to believe a word of this. Junior doctors plan to strike because they want more cash, especially for working at weekends.

Their leaders on the BMA Junior Doctors Committee — which has now become a sinister and highly politicised body — are almost all Labour supporters, several of them avowed Corbynistas active in the Left’s Momentum movement.

They, paradoxically, are not much interested in money, though they recognise that it is the only rallying cry that will stir their membership to down stethoscopes. Their objective is to smash the career of Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and to drive a stake into the heart of the Tory Government.

The Left knows it has scant chance of securing power through conventional politics, of winning a general election any time soon. But its strategists see the NHS as the soft underbelly of government. The public is obsessed with its welfare: any threat to health services frightens the life out of voters.

Thus, doctors’ leaders calculated that blame for paralysing hospitals in five- day strikes would fall not on themselves, where it belongs, but instead on the Tories.

The only real hope of getting these strikes cancelled instead of merely postponed is that voters see through these clumsy — indeed, deadly — tactics, and tell would-be striking doctors exactly what they think of them.

How have we come to this pass, that men and women whose profession has for so long commanded such deserved respect should behave so ruthlessly?

We should admit, as no minister dares, that the NHS is chronically sick. As the cost and sophistication of medical treatments soar, it is becoming unaffordable to provide unlimited care, free at the point of use.

Poor and wasteful administration saps morale and squanders scarce resources. Rational debate about health is stifled by the almost sacred mantra that the NHS is part of Britain’s birthright, and has made us the ever longer-lived society we are today.

In truth, of course, most of the rightful credit belongs to drugs companies driven by private profit, which develop the miracle cures the health service merely delivers to us.

But we should also acknowledge that parts of the NHS work marvellously well. My family has access to a rural GP surgery — that of Ramsbury in Wiltshire — which is widely regarded as one of the best in the land.

My wife has recently been staying with a friend in a South London hospice where the staff are humbling in their sympathy and sensitivity.

Some big hospitals are exemplary, as I can testify after seeing a heart patient treated by the Great Western in Swindon.

Many big city facilities, however, are tragically inadequate: they groan under the strain of over-burdened A&Es, constantly changing doctors, abusive patients, and demoralised staff.

If I were Jeremy Hunt, or for that matter the Fairy Queen, I would not begin to know how to raise standards without radical funding changes, such as will surely be forced upon Britain within a generation.

Ruthless

There is also a wider issue, manifested in all public services including teaching and the police. Once upon a time — in the Barnes Wallis era, if you like — almost all those who worked in them saw themselves as fulfilling a duty to the public.

Most of the public, in its turn, rewarded them with gratitude and respect.

Today, police, teachers and doctors’ professional bodies have become intensely politicised.

One junior doctors’ representative, Andrew Collier, stood for election on a platform which explicitly pledged to make the BMA ‘a real trades union’. But the best doctors, teachers and policemen are too busy doctoring, teaching and policing to involve themselves in the ruthless, dirty politics of their respective organisations. Thus the Left, which cares not a fig about professional standards and everything about mobilising troops for the class struggle, seizes the reins almost unopposed.

Who wants to attend meetings of the Junior Doctors Committee, where arguments often apparently descend into obscenities?

One activist, Sundeep Grewal, a GP registrar, put up a post on his Facebook page which describes Jeremy Hunt in fourletter terms.

That such a person could be a doctor seems almost as disturbing as his ascent to strike-making power.

Excesses

More than a decade ago, U.S. academic Philip Bobbitt published a weighty book on our new world entitled The Shield Of Achilles.

In this he argued that the nation state is giving way to what he calls the ‘market state’, in which traditional ideas of patriotism, loyalty and social responsibility are supplanted by a harsh selfishness, in which profit and personal advantage are the only drivers.

In a procession of recent news stories about Apple’s global tax avoidance, the declining willingness of Western nations to fund their armed forces, and now the shameful conduct of the junior doctors, we see vivid examples of the market state in action.

Everybody merely wants money or factional power. Stuff social responsibility, far less patriotism.

There was a glimmer of good news in the announcement that next week’s action, at least, has been called off pending further talks. But we would be foolish to see this as surrender as opposed to re- entrenchment for battles ahead.

The only hope of bringing the doctors’ leadership to bay is the display of our disgust, to force upon them realisation that the public rejects their claims and abhors their excesses.

The Left cries out endlessly for ‘social justice’ and ‘fairness’. We shall never have either in our society unless or until those who work in our public services recover their old sense of public duty — and thus regain their right to the respect of us all.