Junior doctors are striking for pay restoration because they don’t want to be forced to move abroad in order to be able to make ends meet.

That is the revelation on the third day of their longest strike yet.

Doctors were on their picket lines from 7am today (January 5), pledging to keep up the pressure for the Tory government to restore their real-terms pay to its 2010 level – the same level that MP pay has always maintained:

If the government refuses to level up their pay, the alternative for many junior doctors is to emigrate to another country that provides a better rate of pay. Dr Andrew Meyerson lays out the facts here:

More than 11,000 doctors left the UK for jobs in other countries in 2022, at a time when the UK already had fewer doctors per 1,000 patients than other OECD nations:

This means the Tory government’s intractability on pay is creating a serious staffing shortage in the NHS. This can only be seen as a deliberate choice to starve the NHS of talent.

And the situation is likely to get worse:

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak (foolishly) pledged to cut NHS waiting lists last year and is being challenged on how he proposes to achieve this in the face of the strike:

The only way This Writer can see that promise being fulfilled is if Sunak gives the work to private health firms – who employ NHS doctors and nurses at higher rates of pay.

This means the government would be paying private companies more money to provide the same service it could get for a much more cost-effective price on the NHS.

And all the while, the government would be continuing to starve people who work exclusively for the NHS of the pay they need to make ends meet.

Sunak is supposed to be clever with numbers. Why does he find it impossible to do the arithmetic here?

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