In its long and venerable history dating back 192 years, the British Medical Association used to shy away from being called a “trades union”.
Collective bargaining was for “trades people”; the doctors were independent professionals. Their association was there to campaign for best practice and to offer advice to the politicians regulating health treatment.
That was when the reflex of most medical practitioners was to subscribe to the Hippocratic principle often paraphrased as “first do no harm”.
Much has changed. Today the BMA has no qualms about being described as the “doctors’ union”.
It has freely employed strong-arm negotiating tactics, familiar from industrial disputes, in pursuit of better pay for its members – including strikes, walkouts, deadlines and work to rules.
There can be no doubt that the strikes are doing harm to patient care.
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NHS England has just reported that 89,000 “appointments and procedures” had to be put off because of the three-day strike in December.
Since the industrial action started last March, 1.2 million appointments have been cancelled and rescheduled.
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The BMA rejected requests from the NHS to keep working in critical areas including fast-progressing cancers, corneal transplants and emergency caesareans.
Heated recriminations broke out as the BMA accused hospital managers of “weaponising” so-called “derogation requests” permitting them to recall staff to work if patient safety is “in jeopardy”.
Meanwhile, some A&E departments declared “critical” incidents with waiting times for treatment stretching as long as 16 hours.
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1:22
Patient backs NHS despite cancellations
PM failing to fix waiting list backlog
“Cutting NHS waiting lists” was one of the prime minister’s five pledges and this aim is seriously off track. Opinion polls taken during the dispute suggest that just over half of the public back the strikes (53%).
In a survey four months ago, people were more inclined to blame the government for the dispute (45%) than the BMA (21%), although 25% said they were both responsible.
Yet 11 months into the confrontation, the junior doctors, who lose pay on strike days, must be wondering what they are getting out of it. Their demand for a massive 35.3% pay rise still seems out of reach.
Having walked out of negotiations in December, Dr Vivek Trivedi, co-chair of the BMA junior doctors’ committee, now says he might be prepared to engage in more talks, saying “all we want is a credible offer that we can put to our members and we don’t need to strike again”.
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Although discontent over pay is widespread throughout the NHS workforce, most sectors other than junior doctors in England have accepted deals or, at the least, suspended their action.
NHS consultants accepted salary rises of up to 12.8% along with some pay reforms.
The Royal College of Nursing ballot for further strike action failed and a pay rise of 5.5% was imposed.
Health management is devolved. Junior doctors in Scotland accepted a 12.4% pay rise, on top of 4.5% in 2022/23. Junior doctors in Northern Ireland are balloting on a similar offer. In Wales, there is the prospect of a three-day strike from 15-18 January.
When negotiations broke down before Christmas, the government was offering a 3.3% increase on top of the 8.8% already imposed, taking the total for the English juniors above 12%.
Image: Junior doctors in Scotland have accepted a 12.4% pay rise
Image: The level of doctors’ real-terms pay cut is disputed
Are the strikes really ‘saving the NHS’?
By the standards of the other disputes, a reasonable settlement should be within touching distance were it not for the sense of grievance, embodied in the claim that pay has been cut in real terms by more than a third since 2008.
Few independent analysts accept the BMA’s calculation, which relies heavily on RPI inflation fluctuations. In line with recent trends for national statistics, the independent Institute for Government says the CPIH, the consumer price index, would be a more appropriate indicator, meaning a cut of 11-16%.
This was in the post-credit crunch, austerity period when wages across the public and private sectors stagnated.
The public is sympathetic to junior doctors who help to keep them well, but should they be an exception?
Over time, pay structures change. The youngest and lowest paid of those now on strike were at primary school in 2008; is it rational to restore their pay levels to what they were then?
“Junior doctors” is an unsatisfactory catch-all term for a wide range of hospital doctors. “Doctors in training” – which some Conservative politicians attempted to popularise – hardly does them justice either.
The term covers all hospital doctors who are not consultants, ranging from those just qualified and still effectively indentured, to senior registrars.
First-year junior doctors earn £32,398, rising to £37,303 in the second year and £43,923 in the third. Registrars’ basic pay goes up to £58,000. Full-time NHS consultants earn up to £120,000.
On the picket lines, strikers often argue their action is not about their own pay but to save the NHS because, they say, many of their peers are leaving for better terms in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Conversely, as recent special grade immigration figures show, there are many qualified people abroad with conflicting aspirations who are anxious to come here to work in the NHS.
Much to ponder on how the NHS should work
The additional crisis brought on by the strikes has inevitably prompted some rethinking about how the NHS is working.
Speaking to Sarah-Jane Mee on the Sky News Daily’s How To Fix The NHS mini-podcast series, Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, observed “that everything flowed better” in A&E departments because senior doctors providing cover had more direct contact with patients and “there were fewer people coming into hospital for elective work and this meant more beds”.
Those statements about organisation in the NHS should provide consultants, junior doctors and potential patients with a lot to ponder.
The same goes for politicians, who the public holds primarily responsible for delivering their healthcare.
Steve Barclay took an abrasively inactive approach to the various NHS disputes when he was health secretary. In November he was moved to make way for the more emollient Victoria Atkins.
She says she wants “a fair and reasonable settlement” to end the strikes and is open to further negotiations provided the threat of more strikes is withdrawn.
Image: Health Secretary Victoria Atkins
Image: Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting
Is the NHS broken – and would Labour do any better?
Atkins’ position is not much different from Wes Streeting, her Labour opposite number.
He has said for months that the disputes should be sorted out by negotiations with ministers and that a Labour government would not meet the 35% pay claim.
Streeting is of the view that reform, likely to discomfort some of the NHS’s vested interests, is more needed than extra cash.
Whatever view they take of the doctors’ actions, public pessimism about the NHS is on the rise.
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6:18
Labour won’t match doctors’ demands
Much as they love the NHS, growing numbers of the public say it is “broken” or “not fit for purpose”. There is also a live debate about whether doctors should lose the right to strike, just like the police and members of the armed services.
The pollsters regularly ask the question “should doctors be allowed to strike?”
Last summer, at the height of the consultants’ dispute, 50% said yes, 42% no. By November, support for doctors’ right to strike had dropped to 47% yes, 46% no.
The asking of that question alone would have astonished the founders of the BMA’s precursor, the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, back in 1832.
Tulip Siddiq has told Sky News her “lawyers are ready” to handle any formal questions about allegations she is involved in corruption in Bangladesh.
Asked whether she regrets apparent links with the Bangladeshi Awami League political party, Ms Siddiq said “why don’t you look at my legal letter and see if I have any questions to answer… [the Bangladeshi authorities] have not once contacted me and I’m waiting to hear from them”.
Lawyers acting for Ms Siddiq wrote to the Bangladeshi Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) several weeks ago saying the allegations were “false and vexatious”.
The letter said the ACC must put questions to Ms Siddiq “by no later than 25 March 2025” or “we shall presume that there are no legitimate questions to answer”.
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1:45
Staff from the NCA visited Bangladesh as part of initial work to support the interim government in the country.
In a post online today, the former minister said the deadline had expired and the authorities had not replied.
Sky News has approached the Bangladeshi government for comment.
The allegations against Ms Siddiq are focused on links to her aunt Sheikh Hasina – who served as the prime minister of Bangladesh for 20 years.
She is accused of becoming an autocrat, with politically-motivated arrests, extra-judicial killings and other abuses allegedly happening on her watch. Hasina claims it’s all a political witch hunt.
Ms Siddiq was found to have lived in several London properties that had links back to the Awami League political party that her aunt still leads.
She referred herself to the prime minister’s standards adviser Sir Laurie Magnus who said he had “not identified evidence of improprieties” but added it was “regrettable” Ms Siddiq had not been more alert to the “potential reputational risks” of the ties to her aunt.
Ms Siddiq said continuing in her role would be “a distraction” for the government but insisted she had done nothing wrong.
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX reportedly hired former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to advise it over the federal probe that resulted in the firm pleading guilty to several violations and agreeing to pay $505 million in fines and penalties.
Cuomo, a New York-registered attorney, advised OKX on legal issues stemming from the probe sometime after August 2021 when he resigned as New York overnor, Bloomberg reported on April 2, citing people familiar with the matter.
“He spoke with company executives regularly and counseled them on how to respond to the criminal investigation,” Bloomberg said.
The Seychelles-based firm pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in violation of US Anti-Money Laundering laws on Feb. 24 and agreed to pay $84 million worth of penalties while forfeiting $421 million worth of fees earned from mostly institutional clients.
The breaches occurred from 2018 to 2024 despite OKX having an official policy preventing US persons from transacting on its crypto exchange since 2017, the Department of Justice noted at the time.
A spokesperson for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, told Bloomberg that Cuomo has been providing private legal services representing individuals and corporations on a variety of matters since resigning as New York governor.
“He has not represented clients before a New York city or state agency and routinely recommends former colleagues for positions,” Azzopardi added.
OKX reportedly wasn’t willing to comment on its relationships with outside firms.
Cuomo also influenced OKX to make executive appointments: Bloomberg
Cuomo, who is now running for mayor of New York City, also advised OKX to appoint his friend US Attorney Linda Lacewell to OKX’s board of directors, Bloomberg said.
Lacewell, a former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, was added to the board in 2024 and was named OKX’s new chief legal officer on April 1, according to a recent company statement.
After the investigation concluded, OKX said it would seek out a compliance consultant to remedy the issues stemming from the federal probe and bolster its regulatory compliance program.
“Our vision is to make OKX the gold standard of global compliance at scale across different markets and their respective regulatory bodies,”OKX CEO Star Xu said in a Feb. 24 X post.
United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing reciprocal tariffs on trading partners and a 10% baseline tariff on all imports from all countries.
The reciprocal levies on will be approximately half of what trading partners charge for US imports, Trump said. For example, China currently has a tariff of 67% on US imports, so US reciprocal tariffs on Chinese goods will be 34%. Trump also announced a standard 25% tariff on all automobile imports.
Trump told the media that tariffs would return the country to economic prosperity seen in previous centuries:
“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation. The United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been. So wealthy, in fact, that in the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting.”
“Then, in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying,” Trump said.
Full breakdown of reciprocal tariffs by country. Source: Cointelegraph
Trump presented the tariffs through the lens of economic protectionism and hinted at returning to the economic policies of the 19th century by using them to replace the income tax.
Trump proposes eliminating federal income tax and replacing it with tariff revenue
Trump proposed the idea of abolishing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and funding the federal government exclusively through trade tariffs while still on the campaign trail in October 2024.
US President Donald Trump addresses the media about reciprocal trade tariffs at the April 2 press event. Source: Fox 4 Dallas
The higher range of the tax savings estimate will only occur if other wage-based taxes are eliminated at the state and municipal levels.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who assumed office in February, also voiced support for replacing the IRS with the “External Revenue Service.”
Lutnick said that the US government cannot balance a budget yet consistently demands more from its citizens every year. Tariffs will also protect American workers and strengthen the US economy, he said.