Carole Malone asks how it came to be that Britain has an army of medics willing to let patients die if it means stuffing more money in their pockets.
Carole Malone says don’t get sick this Christmas (Image: Getty)
God help you if you get sick this Christmas. In fact, it will only be God who CAN help you because it sure as hell won’t be striking junior doctors. How did it happen that we now have an army of snout-in-the-trough medics who will let people die because they want their pay packets – which have already increased by nearly 30% in four years – stuffed with even more money?
Just how big do their salaries have to get before they stop holding sick people to ransom and putting lives at risk? Striking at Christmas is about as cruel and cynical as it gets. Doctors know that hospitals already operate with a skeleton staff over the festive period. But this strike means there’ll be even fewer to deal with the flu epidemic which is soon expected to rocket to an all-time high of 5,440 hospital admissions a day and has been called “the biggest challenge since the pandemic”.
In a decent country doctors would answer the call to arms if a tidal wave of Superflu was tearing through our hospitals. But not here. The militant BMA just sees it as a way to squeeze more money out of our buckling NHS. Wes Streeting accuses junior doctors of playing with patients’ lives. But that’s HIS fault because he chucked buckets of money at them, foolishly believing that because he’d stuffed their pockets with gold, they’d actually do their jobs.
What he didn’t bank on was these doctors are now motivated by greed, not patient care. Nor did he bank on the militant BMA which doesn’t give a stuff about patients’ lives – just about causing chaos and sticking two fingers up at the Establishment.
Doctors spuriously claim they want to be valued, not understanding that forever striking won’t make them valued – dedication to, and compassion for, sick people will. And frankly, doctors who leave people to die and desert their posts at a time of national crisis don’t deserve to be valued.
Of course, the people most likely to die during these strikes are the elderly – society’s most vulnerable – and yet we have doctors who care more about money than saving them. Why become a doctor if money is all that motivates you?
Each day of this five-day strike will cost the NHS £500million – how many patients could that save? How many doctors and nurses could it pay for?
We keep being fed the lie that the majority aren’t striking for money but because their jobs and prospects of career progression are being allocated to foreign doctors. Which is a lie because Wes Streeting offered them a deal this week that would have corrected that – and they’ve rejected it. So, it really IS all about money.
As for the BMA’s tired old argument that they’re striking because pay has fallen between 20-26% in real terms since 2008. No, it hasn’t. The OBR has made clear that the Retail Price Index – the measure of inflation the BMA used to calculate this figure – is not reliable. It says the Consumer Price Index calculates the fall in pay at a mere 4.7%. And with the monumental pay rises they had – 28.9% over the previous three years – they’ve more than made up for any losses.
I’m sure there are some decent doctors who will do their job and their duty and refuse to strike this Christmas. But the ones who do walk out need to take a long hard look at the rabble-rousing militants representing them and ask if they’re worth losing their hard-won reputations over. Doctors used to be among the respected people in Britain but they’re losing that respect thanks to a bunch of union militants who’re making them look like cynical money grabbers.
