So, Jeremy Hunt is doing at the Department of Health exactly what he managed at the Department of Culture – somehow avoid getting the sack (as of Friday 13th – here’s hoping). Having created the fiction of a “five-day” NHS in order to gain the glory of creating a “seven-day” NHS, the Tories are now doing what they do best – falling out with working people.
Now we since the 1970s have been profoundly anti-union in large sections of society. Hence the Iron Lady’s success and the inevitable response to any threat of strike action of “oh no the bloody working class again”. This applies to miners, tube drivers and teachers (who, while not necessarily working class, are obviously ALWAYS left wing whingers to the Tory mind). The problem is that these hard-working people are junior doctors who work extraordinary long hours for a reward which most people in the UK would bite their hand off for – but which given the hours of study and the huge cost of training is generally considered reasonable. So when working hours increase without any discernible compensation (despite the attempts to spin a 11% pay increase out of thin air), most people are surely likely to side with them.
In other words, people will start thinking. If the Tories have fallen out with miners, tube drivers, teachers, lawyers and now doctors, there is surely a possibility it isn’t always the workers’ fault. Maybe its the governments.
So the dilemma for the doctors, and indeed for those of us liberal enough to be on their side, is whether they should strike or not. The Shakespearean dilemma is a difficult one – it seems highly likely that with the clown faced Hunt on the warpath the doors of negotiation are closed. So how else can they get want they want.
The problem for them is threefold:
1) They provide what is generally seen as an indispensable, and is certainly a life-saving service. They therefore most certainly won’t want to strike.
2) They therefore risk losing public support from those in the public who see a strike as something akin to the raising of the red flag above Buck House.
3) They risk losing public support from people who are sympathetic and reasonable, but who remember the country being torn apart in the 1970s by overzealous unions.
So what should they do? And what should the Lib Dems and Labour do? They will want to back them to the hilt, but will also be wary of accusations of supporting the endangering of lives and militarism. It is rather a no win scenario for them. This was evidenced clearly by Chuka Umunna’s ambivalent answers on Question Time. They are guilty either of Marxism and endangering lives or of allowing the government to run roughshod over doctors’ right to work reasonable hours for a good reward and not to have their lives endangered by exhausted and overworked junior doctors.
Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats must fight the government on this. It is not the doctors who are choosing to escalate this, it is the egregious Hunt. At the risk of ripping off a great liberal of the past, they must fight them at the pickets, they must fight them in the House of Commons, they must fight them in the Lords and in the streets. They may not succeed but they must not surrender. Political parties cannot always make a difference in an unfair system, but they must at least try – or else what are they for?
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