Doctors plot to cause most strike misery and still get paid

Medics secretly plan to maximise chaos as support for action fades

JUNIOR doctors have drawn up secret plans to cause maximum number of operations and appointments to be cancelled on strike days – while ensuring they still get paid.

Doctors are being advised not to tell health bosses if they plan to strike in order to make contingency planning more difficult.

NHS managers are currently drawing up rotas to cope with the strikes, but junior doctors are being told not to tell hospitals in advance whether they plan to come to work.

That tactic will allow doctors who turn up for their shift at the last minute to still be paid. However, routine procedures will already have been cancelled because of the uncertainty.

The postings on a Facebook forum used by junior doctors to exchange strike tactics have alarmed Department of Health and hospital officials trying to cope with a series of five-day strikes, to be held once a month in the run-up to Christmas.

In one posting, a junior doctor in London wrote: “I know some of us are concerned about being able to afford to go on strike. If money is an issue… simply do not inform your employer as to whether you will strike or not. Or choose a couple of random days to strike.

“They will be forced to cover your shifts and cancel elective work but you can turn up and get paid. Maximum disruption. Minimal effect on your pay packet.”

Another responded: “Fantastic idea.”

In another post, a junior doctor in Gillingham said: “No one is insisting you strike for 5 days. Strike for as many days as you can. Inform your trust at the last minute of the dates you will be striking… the system cannot plan and will have to cancel elective work!”

In another posting a junior doctor advised: “Even if you are not going to strike… please just do not tell them you are going to be in or not but turn up. You will be paid still.”

Hospital authorities estimate as many as 500,000 operations and four million appointments will have to be cancelled to cope with the rolling walk-outs in a dispute over new contracts being imposed on junior doctors.

But there is growing concern among many junior doctors that the strike action is too extreme. Thousands of doctors are now expected to defy their professional body, the British Medical Association, and work as normal.

Tom Oates, a junior doctor specialising in kidney disease in London, said he would be crossing the picket line – despite having taken part in earlier strikes.

Dr Oates said he had been contacted by other doctors who would do the same after he made his views public.

Dr Oates, a long-time member of the Labour Party, said: “I voted for the first set of strikes, went out on strike and was very happy to go out. However, when I voted for the strike, I didn’t vote for a load of escalated industrial actions.”

Just two months before the free world elects its next leader – if you believe America leads the free world, that is – the world’s liberal media seem united on two things. The first is that Donald Trump is a monster. The second is that he will lose the US presidential election on November 8.

The first contention may well be true. I am not sure I would want Mr Trump to marry my daughter (if I had one), and he has said and done things both as a businessman and as a politician of which most civilised people would not be proud. However, as I have been writing here since last autumn, his defeat is no certainty.

It is one thing for an army of pundits, mainly in America but also here, to decide that because they think a man is vile, with opinions to match, he cannot win an election. But there is no logic behind that assertion. One need only look at some who hold high elected office in our own and other democracies to work that out. The present leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, for example – about to be returned to that position by a thumping majority – has feted the Irish Republican Army and associated with some of the vilest anti-semites.

Mr Trump defies gravity. Every time he says something that would end the career of a politician in most of the Western world, his poll ratings rise. A crude attempt to libel his wife has just spectacularly backfired. Mrs Clinton leads in the polls, but the gap is closing. After the conventions she led in a Fox News poll by 9 per cent. Now she leads in the same poll by 2 per cent. Her leads have particularly shrunk in swing states. The liberal establishment in America, while pretending Mr Trump is toast, quakes with fear at the thought that he just might pull it off. Earlier in the summer the

the parish magazine of East Coast liberalism, published an issue in which every cartoon ridiculed Mr Trump. Its readers were not entirely charmed, one or two pointing out that if Mr Trump really was irrelevant, what was the point in emphasising his existence in this way? Since then it has avoided saturation coverage, but most editions of the magazine include something painting Mr Trump as deeply undesirable, or highlighting elements of his campaign as if it were a freak show. The daily email the magazine sends its subscribers also routinely contains another exercise in solemn vilification of the Republican candidate. These boys are clearly worried.

And they are right. First, Mrs Clinton remains unappealing to a vast body of Americans, including to many Democratic party supporters. The question of the potential security breach for which she was responsible in using a private email server has harmed her character. The FBI documents just published exposing her carelessness with classified information reinforce the impression that when it comes to important regulations, there is one law for her and one for everybody else. She is funded by the sort of squillionaire Wall Street types middle America has come to blame for its financial woes. She has not given a press conference for over 270 days, which starts to cause some, even in the obedient US media, to wonder what she might have to hide.

She has done nothing to consolidate the “bounce” she enjoyed after her convention, because she has very little new to say. Her campaign has consisted of telling people to vote for the profoundly under-achieving and corrupt political establishment that has so failed America since the Reagan years.

Mr Trump, by contrast, has managed to engage with millions of Americans who had given up on politics, and offer them something different. It may be rank populism, it may be demagoguery, it may repel many other millions of people, but it has energised legions who have for decades felt that America’s political class disdained them. In some cases, but far from all, they are less educated and live in unsophisticated places, but their votes count the same as that of a millionaire on the Upper East Side with a PhD.

This is the key to Mr Trump’s possible success, and it echoes lessons of Brexit. We are in the process of leaving the European Union because another populist, Nigel Farage, had connected with those alienated from British mainstream politics. He got them out to vote. The 72 per cent turnout was the highest in any UK poll since the 1992 election.

I suspect Mr Trump will marshal millions – possibly tens of millions – of Americans who would never normally vote in a presidential election. The turnout in 2012 was just 54.9 per cent – though that represented an improvement on 49 per cent in 1996, when Mrs Clinton’s husband won his second election, shortly before his impeachment for perjury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In 2012, more than 106 million Americans of voting age did not bother to vote. They are Mr Trump’s captive audience.

Impartial observers of the present race also believe some pollsters are oversampling Democratic supporters in their fieldwork. If that is true, Mr Trump could already be ahead. Again, we should look to our own recent experiences. The polls more or less consistently forecast a Remain victory, and although there was nothing like the unanimity of pundits against Brexit that there is against Mr Trump, those who did back Remain bought entirely in to the “Project Fear” argument, which seems only to have provoked millions of others to defy them and their scaremongering.

America is in a terrible mess and I doubt that even Mr Trump, given two terms, could sort it out. He has worrying views on international security. If he follows a protectionist line he will reduce America’s economic power, deepening the poverty and inequality already prevalent there. And the last thing America seems to need are more volatile young men walking around with guns. But they see things very differently away from the salons of Manhattan and Washington, or the poolside parties of Bel Air: and just how differently we may be about to find out.

‘He will marshal millions of Americans who would never normally vote’