Wes Streeting has urged junior doctors to call off their planned pre-election strike, promising to call them “on day one” if Labour wins on July 4.
The shadow health secretary said he’s “beyond furious” that the dispute, which has lasted for more than a year, is still ongoing, but added that “the money isn’t there” to give junior doctors a 35 percent pay rise.
Junior doctors in England will walk out between 7 a.m. June 27 and 7 a.m. July 2, two days before polling day after the latest round of talks broke down, the British Medical Association (BMA) has announced, saying Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had failed to make a credible offer to junior doctors.
The union has been calling for a “pay restoration” for junior doctors, saying their salary has decreased by over a quarter in real terms compared to 2008.
Asked about the upcoming strike on Sky News’s “Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips” programme, Mr. Streeting said: “This government is incapable of resolving the dispute before polling day on July 4. I don’t think there’s anything to be achieved by having strikes in the election campaign.”
The shadow secretary said the only things that a pre-election strike will lead to are “more untold misery inflicted on patients who see their appointments and procedures delayed” and junior doctors being “out of pocket” amid cost of living pressures.
“I’ve called on them to call off the strikes in the election campaign, give change a chance on July 4 knowing that if there is a Labour government on July 5, I will be phoning them on day one and asking the department to get talks up and running urgently,” he added.
Mr. Streeting said he’s “beyond furious that this is still happening,” and claimed Mr. Sunak had “sought to scapegoat and blame NHS staff” for growing hospital waiting lists in a previous debate.
However, the shadow secretary reiterated that “the money isn’t there” when asked if he would take seriously the demand for a 35 percent pay raise, and said Labour would be willing to negotiate on pay and conditions.
When the BMA announced the strike, it said that if Mr. Sunak had made a “concrete commitment to restore doctors’ pay” during his campaign “that is acceptable to the BMA’s junior doctors committee, then no strikes need go ahead.”
In May, the government and the BMA entered mediated talks to try to resolve the dispute.
But they failed to reach an agreement before parliamentary business was concluded in the run-up to the election.
The last strike by junior doctors, from Feb. 24 to Feb. 28 this year, led to the postponement of 91,048 appointments, operations, and procedures.
Comparing parties’ manifestos, on Friday, the Nuffield Trust said they imply annual increases in the next four years of 1.5 percent for the Liberal Democrats, 0.9 percent for the Conservatives, and 1.1 percent for Labour, and they are all smaller than the recent rate of population growth.
Asked about the analysis, Mr. Streeting said Labour’s manifesto is “fully costed, fully funded with promises we can keep and the country can afford.”
He also said he disagrees with Nuffields forecast, implying Labour may announce more spending in the NHS down the line.
“Where I disagree with the Nuffield trust is the assumption they’re making, that this manifesto is the grand sum total of any future budgets and any future spending reviews. That’s just wrong,” he said.
“Where labour is making the fundamental argument at this election is we’ve got to get the economy back to growth, because if the economy had grown under this government at just the same rate it did under the last Labour government, there'd be tens of billions of pounds more to either invest in our public services or to put back in people’s pockets,” he added.
