Kemi Badenoch, with headline text overlay criticising strike ban proposal.

Badenoch would ban doctor strikes – who’s really holding the country to ransom?

Last Updated: July 28, 2025By

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Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has pledged that, if her party wins power again, it will ban NHS doctors from striking — a move critics have branded authoritarian, hypocritical, and desperate.

In comments to the BBC, Badenoch claimed the British Medical Association (BMA), the union representing doctors, had become “more and more militant,” and insisted her party would impose minimum service level laws on doctors, bringing them under the same restrictions as police and armed forces.

But the comparison doesn’t hold up under scrutiny — either morally or legally.

Desperate politics from the party that gutted the NHS

Dr Tom Dolphin, chair of the BMA, called the proposal “a desperate intervention from a Conservative Party that spent nearly 15 years failing the NHS.”

That’s a fair summary. Since 2010, successive Tory governments have underfunded the health service, overseen a mass exodus of staff, and driven morale into the ground.

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The junior doctors’ strikes have emerged as a last resort, after years of real-term pay erosion, chronic understaffing, and brutal working conditions.

While the government boasts about a 5.4 per cent pay rise this year (on top of a 22 per cent increase over the past two), the BMA points out that doctors’ pay is still down by around 20 per cent in real terms since 2008.

They’re calling for a 26 per cent uplift just to restore parity.

Badenoch’s response was to threaten to remove the right to strike — one of the most fundamental rights in any modern democracy.

‘A vocation, not just a job’ – the classic gaslighting line

As if ripping out their rights wasn’t enough, Badenoch leaned into the tired old line that medicine is a “vocation, not just a job” – as if that justifies exploitation.

One wonders if she’d say the same about MPs, whose own pay has conveniently kept pace with inflation.

Yes — MPs’ salaries are up around 28 per cent since 2010, while doctors are still 20 per cent behind parity after the recent pay rises.

So when Badenoch claims doctors got “a better pay offer than any other group,” she’s either badly informed or flat-out lying.

Either way, that’s hypocrisy — and dangerous hypocrisy at that.

Authoritarian drift: a party with no solutions turns to force

The move echoes broader authoritarian trends in Conservative policy.

Having already passed legislation imposing minimum service levels across some public sectors, they now seek to go further, effectively criminalising medical professionals who stand up for their working conditions and patient safety.

And let’s be clear: this is not about harming patients.

When hospitals and consultants cover emergency care during strikes;

when the BMA has emergency recall procedures built in;

and when most non-urgent services continue unaffected,

it’s hard to see this as anything but a political attack on trade unionism.

It’s not about safety. It’s about silencing dissent.

False comparisons: misleading the public with international examples

The Conservatives argue their plan would bring the UK in line with countries like Canada or Australia, but this too is deeply misleading.

In those countries, restrictions come with stronger collective bargaining rights, higher baseline pay, and genuine investment in healthcare systems.

In other words: they’re not gutting their health services while telling doctors to shut up and be grateful.

The BMA rightly calls the comparison “misleading”. So should we.

A “National Interest” Power Grab?

Badenoch dressed her proposal as a “common-sense” move to “protect the NHS” and “the public finances.”

But voters should ask: who is really damaging the NHS here?

  • A union seeking to restore fair pay and retain medical staff?

  • Or a political party willing to sacrifice rights, safety, and truth to cover for its own catastrophic record?

The right to strike is a cornerstone of any free society.

That Badenoch wants to remove it — while pretending it’s for our own good — should be a warning to every worker in Britain.

If they come for the doctors now, who will they come for next?

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