Betrayed once again: Labour sends doctors back to the picket lines.

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Less than a year into office, Labour has already managed to push the NHS’s most overworked staff back to the brink.

Resident doctors in England — formerly known as junior doctors — have once again voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action.

It’s the latest escalation in a long-running pay dispute that Labour, in opposition, promised to resolve.

Instead, they’ve chosen to follow the same austerity path as the Conservatives they replaced.

The message from frontline medics is crystal clear: they feel betrayed.

The British Medical Association (BMA) says pay for resident doctors is still around 20 per cent lower in real terms than it was in 2008.

That’s despite a headline-grabbing 22 per cent pay award last year, and a further 5.4 per cent this year.

The union wants pay restoration — a return to the real-terms salary level before a decade and a half of cuts.

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“Our pay may have declined, but our will to fight remains strong,”

said BMA committee co-chairs Ross Nieuwoudt and Melissa Ryan.

“All we need is a credible pay offer and nobody need strike.”

But Labour isn’t budging.

The government insists the deal is done.

“We can’t be more generous than we already have [been],”

said a Downing Street spokesperson — with the same logic Tory ministers used year after year to deny fair pay.

It’s no wonder doctors are furious.

“New deal for working people” — or old lies in a red wrapper?

This is not just another pay dispute. It’s a test of Labour’s integrity, and that party is failing.

Before the election, Labour’s shadow health team railed against real-terms pay cuts and pledged to rebuild trust with the NHS.

Now, in government, Health Secretary Wes Streeting calls the four per cent offer a “step forward.”

But for doctors seeing pay continue to stagnate — and for unions that suspended strikes in good faith — it feels more like a slap in the face.

BMA chair Prof Philip Banfield didn’t mince words:

“There is no serious plan to reverse a decade and a half of decline. Doctors are exhausted, underpaid, and now being gaslit by a government that claimed it had our backs.”

This is the Labour government he’s talking about — not the Tories.

Starmer’s team claimed they would fix what the Conservatives broke.

Instead, they appear to be managing the decline with a slightly friendlier press release.

It raises a fundamental question: What, exactly, did voters get in exchange for their hope?

Consequences you can’t spin

The NHS is already in crisis.

The last wave of strikes led to hundreds of thousands of cancelled procedures and missed appointments.

Another round — authorised now for up to six months — could strain waiting lists further than ever.

The NHS Confederation, which represents service providers, warned the strike vote threatens to derail recovery efforts.

“It is disappointing that despite making ending the resident doctors’ strikes a priority, the government is now back to where it was a year ago,”

said NHS Confederation chief Matthew Taylor.

But the blame doesn’t lie with doctors.

It lies with a government that refuses to listen — a party that pinned its election campaign on fixing the NHS, only to keep it running on fumes.

There’s no way around it: Labour’s refusal to restore pay isn’t a matter of prudence — it’s a political choice.

A choice to protect fiscal rules over public health.

A choice to leave frontline workers underpaid, demoralised, and blamed when the system breaks.

And yet again, the government tries to downplay the strike mandate — pointing to a 55 per cent turnout, as if democratic legitimacy suddenly depends on turnout thresholds. That’s another Tory tactic.

And isn’t it funny how they never apply that logic to general elections..?

Divide, conquer, and undercut

Adding insult to injury, Labour has offered even less to other NHS staff.

Nurses and midwives were offered a measly 3.6 per cent — prompting the Royal College of Nursing to call the offer “grotesque.”

Consultants and specialists are now being balloted for their own industrial action.

Rather than unite the NHS workforce behind a new era of support and respect, Labour is fostering division and resentment.

That’s not leadership.

That’s cowardice.

Labour’s honeymoon is over

It’s not just the NHS feeling the chill.

Teachers have also been offered four per cent — accepted by some unions only on condition of full funding, which the government has already hinted will come via “smarter spending” (Whitehall-speak for more cuts).

Starmer promised voters “Change”.

What they’re getting looks dangerously like business as usual – with different branding.

Labour MPs have made sure their pay keeps pace with inflation.

They’ve protected their own pensions, perks, and salaries.

Perhaps it’s time they lived under the same conditions they demand from the people holding our health system together.

If Labour wants to avoid a political implosion, it must remember who put it in power — and why.

Right now, it’s not just doctors being pushed to the edge by Labour politicians.

It’s the voters who believed them.