Category Archives: Doctors

Junior doctor explains the facts of NHS strikes on TV. SHE won’t be asked back!

Junior doctors are striking for the restoration of pay that has been cut by 35 per cent: apparently the government is giving the cash to private contractors instead.

This was a tour-de-force performance by junior doctor Anna Warrington.

Invited onto the BBC’s Politics Live, she explained how blame for the costs of the junior doctors’ strike lies entirely at the door of a Tory government that has been so stupid, for so many years, that it never made any contingency plans for problems delivering healthcare.

There’s a clip below but it doesn’t contain the full interview. Initially, presenter Jo Coburn challenged Dr Warrington to explain

why the total cost of the junior doctor walkouts – 19 days before last week – is likely to be more than £1 billion.

Dr Warrington said: “It is – I think – outrageous that the NHS is reliant on private contractors to complete everyday, essential services.

“Where was the government’s workforce planning when they slashed successive pay rounds, year on year, so that there are too few doctors and nurses to staff the NHS adequately without reaching out to private contractors – who can reasonably charge a private contractor’s rate?”

Stymied there, Ms Coburn generalised the question out: how did junior doctors justify any cost to their walkouts at all?

“I think it’s justified by the strength of the crisis that we are facing in the NHS at the moment,” said Dr Warrington. “I’m not just striking for pay restoration for myself; I’m striking for NHS restoration for the public.

“Every day, at work, I see one doctor doing the job of three. I see operating theatres closed due to lack of staffing. The patients aren’t getting value for money. The NHS is in crisis. This is due to chronic underfunding, a failure of workforce planning, and a failure to remunerate staffing adequately, as a result of which there simply aren’t enough people left to make this service function – in addition to which, the buildings are crumbling.

“The NHS is at the point of total destruction, in my experience at work and those of my colleagues in addition. It’s worth investing £1.8 billion finger-pointing at the government so that they take action, because this is a crisis.”

Next:

So the amount being quoted as the cost per staff member, per shift, was the maximum possible. You see how the government seems to have twisted information there?

Hearing a panellist saying the solution has to be through negotiation, Dr Warrington pointed out: “The government aren’t negotiating.”

Would she get a better deal from a Labour government?

“I’m not assured that the solution is obvious, nor that any political party is in possession of it.

“In this discussion earlier, we were talking about privatised services and how those have not succeeded, and I am not convinced that we know that privatising any limb of the NHS will result in better value for the customer.

“If people are concerned about the moral repugnance of doctors charging three grand a shift now, imagine what it will be like when it has been privatised – believe me.”

Asked who is putting forward the idea that the NHS is going to be privatised (an idea put forward by several members of that day’s panel), Dr Warrington said: “My understanding is that successive Conservative governments have beleaguered the NHS so that very few alternatives are available.

“I think introducing market forces into the health service … has been extended further by the Conservatives, to the extent that we find ourselves where we are now.

“There are private contractors in the NHS; they do charge more, and the NHS has to pay what they charge until the NHS is adequately staffed itself and, unfortunately, because of successive pay cuts to the tune of 35 per cent, mind – remember, this is pay restoration, not a pay rise – there is now a workforce crisis that is driving the NHS further into the ground.

“The public are not getting value for money; something must be done. I do think that the very least that the government could do is come into negotiations with the doctors, who do see what it is like on the ground.”

The Tory then claimed it was ludicrous to complain about having private doctors providing NHS services, as long as those services were free at the point of use – thereby undermining Ms Coburn’s attack line about the cost of bringing in private contractors to cover the cost of strikes.

Dr Warrington picked up on this: “I thought there was some moral affront earlier at the idea that these strikes were costing money because private contractors had to be paid to cover the cost of doctors.

“And that is the same on every day of the week; there are private contractors fulfilling the role, and if I was a patient, I consider it poor value for money. As a doctor, I’m delighted that some of my pay can be restored through additional work.”

At least, I think that’s what she said. She was being drowned out by the Tory on the panel. Perhaps he didn’t like the point she was making – that she could work as a private doctor, within the NHS, and demand higher pay for doing so; this proved her point that allowing private contractors into the NHS is poor value for public money.

What a brilliant performance. She absolutely destroyed any argument against the junior doctors’ strikes.

Sadly, knowing the political climate – in which both Labour and the Tories are planning to bring in more privatisation, spending far more on private contractors in the NHS than the service’s own staff – we can be assured that Dr Warrington’s words have guaranteed only one thing.

She won’t be asked back onto Politics Live.


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Why do useless Tory MPs think they deserve so much more pay than life-saving docs?

Who would have thought that this cartoon could be re-used? Now, as when he was Health Secretary, Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has doctors on the rack. He’s not going to pay them the 35% cost-of-living increase he owes them – but he and his colleagues have been happy to take a 42% rise for themselves.

Take a look at the clip below, in which Steve Brine MP, Tory chair of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, says junior doctors do not deserve the 35 per cent pay increase that would be required to give them parity with their pay in 2010:

Now read this:

Conservative MPs have been worse than useless to the UK since 2010.

They have plunged the country into five times the debt it had in 2005, with nothing to show for it but a crashing economy and nose-diving public services, including a National Health Service that is constantly on the verge of collapse due to intrusive privatisation and over-demand due to the effects of all the Tories’ other policies.

Junior doctors, working within that crashing health service even as it crumbles around them, are far more valuable – for the obvious reason: They are genuine life savers.

But it is the Tory MPs who hold the purse strings.

They could have refused the recommended pay rises that have been offered to them since 2010 but they haven’t. They have taken the money. They have also taken huge wodges of cash in donations from businesspeople, along with the advice of those donors on what to do. You can form your own conclusion about the value of that advice to the majority of us.

And while taking all that filthy lucre – a higher proportional increase than the amount the junior doctors have lost over the same period of time – the Tories have told junior doctors that they do not deserve a pay rise equal to the increase in the cost of living.

No wonder medical professionals are quitting the NHS as fast as they can.

There is a word for MPs like Mr Brine. It begins with a ‘C’ – but it sure isn’t ‘Conservative’.


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Don’t be misled by media lies: here are the reasons your doctors are on strike

Junior doctors have begun four days of strikes to raise awareness of the way the Tory government is crippling the NHS in England, repeating their call for better pay and more investment in the service. At the moment, Tory policy is killing people who should be getting treatment. Can you stomach that?

This is for anybody who still thinks doctors are harming England’s health service by going on strike: they are striking to stop the harm being inflicted by your Tory government!

This post may be quite long so, for those of you who don’t have much time, I’ll try to summarise it, here at the top:

Tory claims that their pay offer to doctors is fair are not true: it is a crappy real-terms pay cut.

Tory claims that their pay offer was recommended by an independent pay review body are also untrue: everybody on that organisation was employed by the Tory government and was told the exact amount the Tory government would make available for pay, before being told to make a decision on it.

Tory claims that doctors’ pay demands are inflationary are lies: junior doctors’ pay has fallen by 26 per cent, in real terms, since 2008. It is impossible for a decrease in costs to be inflationary. Many NHS doctors are now deeply in debt because of Tory pay cuts.

Tory claims that doctors are refusing to negotiate are lies: it is the Tory government that is refusing to negotiate.

Not only are the Tories refusing to negotiate; they are actually preparing to strip doctors of their right to strike, making it impossible for them ever to regain the fair pay and conditions that everybody working in the UK should have as a matter of course.

The NHS in England is currently under severe strain, with the number of people waiting for treatment now standing at 7.6 million – more than at any time in its 75-year history.

These problems were not caused by doctors but by deliberate Tory government de-funding; Tory ministers have taken money away from the health service in order to make it break down. People are dying because of Tory government policy – that is Steve Barclay’s intention; it is what Rishi Sunak wants.

The Tories have made multiple promises over the years that they have claimed will solve the problems facing the NHS – but it is Tory policy never to follow through on those promises.

Doctors are striking because these Tory policies mean they can no longer do their job.

Many of them are themselves facing mental illness due to the stress of being unable to treat people who desperately need help.

Over the same period of time that waiting lists have been lengthening, Tory government policy has been to privatise increasing numbers of NHS services, claiming that the introduction of private, profit-making corporations into healthcare will somehow make it more efficient, rather than draining funds from an already cash-starved organisation. The result has been catastrophic, with almost all parts of the English health service going from an operating surplus into deep debt. This has created even more stress for doctors.

The effect of this state-sponsored incompetence has been to push people into seeking private health treatment in order to jump the NHS queue – whether they can afford it or not. So not only is the NHS now in debt but so are many people who are suffering with illnesses and other conditions whose treatment should be funded by their National Insurance money and public funding.

Of course, it may be possible to get funding for health treatments via private insurance – if the insurer agrees that the policy you have is intended to pay for the treatment you need. Private insurance firms are salivating at the prospect of taking money from people whose health needs mean they cannot wait for an NHS that has been crippled by Tory de-funding to get round to them.

Those are the headline points. Now let’s put some meat on the bones.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic to explain the broad situation:

Here’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy and the Channel 4 News team to explain why the number of people waiting for help is soaring:

You’ll have noticed that the C4 News piece said strikes are disrupting services, and seen the defence of strikes by a doctor under interview. Here’s Grace Blakeley to further explain why doctors are striking:

Rishi Sunak, during a phone-in on LBC radio, blamed the increase in waiting lists on striking doctors. Here’s just one – factual – reaction to that:

And now let’s listen to a junior doctor named Olivia as she explains the facts of NHS life to a prime minister whose facial expression clearly shows that he couldn’t care less:

Here’s Dr Andrew Meyerson to explain how Tory government policy has crippled the NHS:

Here’s Channel 4 News (again), interviewing a GP on how he and others in his profession have been affected by the Tory-created problems in the NHS:

Here’s Dr Meyerson (again) on the medical debt inflicted on patients by Tory government policy:

Businesses – particularly insurance firms – know an opportunity when they see one. Here’s Axa, explaining why Tory government policy is ushering in an era of insurance-based healthcare, similar to the system in the United States, where health costs are a major cause of bankruptcy:

Now you have the facts. The question is: who do you support – the Tory government, or the striking doctors?


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Tory ‘useful idiot’ Helen Whately in new ‘foot in mouth’ crisis

Helen Whately: she’s smiling in the photograph, possibly because she’s just had her foot removed from her mouth. Shortly after it was taken, she would have re-inserted it.

Tory social care minister Helen Whately should spend half her life in hospital, considering how often she gets her own feet lodged in her mouth.

Here she is, discussing the forthcoming three-day junior doctors’ strike, starting on July 13 – saying the Tory government doesn’t habitually accept the recommendations of independent pay review bodies, followed by historical contradictions from the health secretary and prime minister (courtesy of Peter Stefanovic).

We can’t expect better from a minister in the Department of Health and Social Care who lies about the number of doctors and nurses available to the public who pay for them, as we see here:

For the sake of balance, I should add that the Conservatives have succeeded admirably in their ambitions for the National Health Service: they wanted to reduce it to a lower-quality, postcode-lottery system that provides no value for money to the people who pay for it, because their donors in the private health sector wanted to take public money that was formerly used on healthcare and put it in their offshore bank accounts as profit.

The amount of money that is wasted in such a manner is phenomenal – but then, the healthcare firms do spend millions funding ministers and shadow ministers.

As far as those ministers, shadow ministers and healthcare executives are concerned, all the right people are benefiting from this situation.

The only people who don’t are those who rely on the NHS – and who cares about them?


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Watch this junior doctor shred Tory claims about strikes

The Tory government’s policy on strike action by junior doctors was shredded into mincemeat when health minister Rachel Maclean tried to argue it out with Dr Robert Laurenson, co-chair of the British Medical Association’s Junior Doctors’ Committee on the BBC’s Politics Live (June 14, 2023).

Challenged over whether junior doctors should begin a strike in a heatwave, he pointed out that the NHS is in crisis whether in a heatwave or not – and specialist staff were in place to handle any respiratory issues (for example).

He pointed out to the government minister, whose salary has remained stable up to the present day, that her government has cut pay for junior doctors, repeatedly, for the past 15 years.

This is in line with overall pay stagnation across the UK since 2005, that has been reported recently. Tories like Ms Maclean have presided over the longest period of pay stagnation since Napoleonic times, while making decisions that made inflation skyrocket. Ms Maclean had claimed that pay is rising and this is not true.

The housing minister said strikes must be called off for talks to continue, but Dr Laurenson pointed out that this is not practical for junior doctors – they would be disarming and putting themselves in a position where the government could simply continue to cut pay, year on year.

The government didn’t even recognise the full recommendations of the “supposedly” independent pay review body that said without addressing junior doctor pay there would be a significant impact on patient safety, not because of strikes but because of the effect on productivity and staff retention, said Dr Laurenson.

Challenged over whether it was practical to give junior doctors the 35 per cent rise that would replace all the pay they had lost, he said it’s an increase from £14 per hour to £20 per hour, which is not a huge hike.

And when MPs have managed to keep their own already-high pay at parity with its level in 2010, they don’t have a leg to stand on.


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Junior doctors are to strike again in latest Tory government failure

Junior doctors are to strike again (as they did in 2016 when this image was taken).

This speaks for itself:

Junior doctors in England have announced a new 72-hour walkout in June after the latest round of government pay talks broke down.

The strike will take place between 07:00 on Wednesday 14 June and 07:00 on Saturday 17 June.

The British Medical Association (BMA) union, which represents doctors and medical students, said a government offer of a 5% rise was not “credible”.

Ministers said pay talks could only continue if the strike was called off.

Clearly, junior doctors are refusing to be bullied by the Tories, in the face of the anti-strike Bill that’s going through Parliament right now.

Perhaps they agree with Jeremy Corbyn, who has stated that

Doctors and nurses are striking because patients are dying.

In scapegoating NHS staff, teachers, railway workers, posties and civil servants, the government is forcing ordinary people to pay the price for a crisis caused by decades of austerity, economic mismanagement, and corporate greed.

Good; because the Tories might carp about needing “minimum service levels”, but these strikes are happening because the Tories have made it impossible for any such minimum to be met.

The only way to get “minimum service levels” in the NHS is for these doctors to succeed with their strike action.


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Barclay’s lawsuit against striking nurses is just one example of his contempt for the NHS

Steve Barclay: he holds NHS staff in contempt, even though he’s surrounded by kit that he can’t make work – and they can.

It’s as though NHS employees – doctors, nurses or whoever – are the children of an abusive parent.

And Health Secretary Steve Barclay’s mistreatment of (among others) nurses has not gone unnoticed.

So the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing has condemned as “disgraceful” his decision to “bully” nurses into submission with legal action against their next two-day strike.

Her response echoes that of an abused family member who has taken too much and refuses to accept any more…

The leader of the Royal College of Nursing has said a legal attempt by the health secretary to block next weekend’s strike in England is “frightening for democracy and very frightening for trade unionism”.

Pat Cullen, general secretary of the RCN, said it was “disgraceful” that Steve Barclay was attempting to thwart the strike via the courts, and said nurses would “not be bullied into silence”.

“We have instructed our legal counsel and we will stand up for nursing. This is about standing up not just for nursing but for trade unionism and for democracy,” she told the Observer.

“It’s utterly disgraceful that he [Barclay] would prefer to use money to challenge nurses than to pay them, at a time when those nurses are struggling to pay their bills. He is using public funding, patients’ money, to challenge nurses through the court.”

She added that a claim by Barclay that the government’s legal action sought to protect nurses who could “otherwise be asked to take part in unlawful activity that could in turn put their professional registration at risk” was a “blatant threat”. “He is trying to frighten nursing staff. That registration is their livelihood,” she said.

It’s actually insulting. Barclay is playing the ‘kindly uncle’ character, who fakes concern for youngsters in his charge while actually subjecting them to harm.

Sadly, his attitude is rubbing off on members of the general public, who are also starting to treat NHS staff as government property, in the same way some children have to comply with parental wishes (whether they are benign or not – and in this case they’re malign).

And what’s the upshot of all this abuse?

Let’s skip across to see what’s happening to doctors:

Like a child suffering mental health problems as a result of living in an abusive household?

You may be thinking that the comparison is false. Doctors and nurses are, after all, highly-trained professionals who could merrily move out to any other health organisation in this or other countries.

But the UK’s National Health Service has an emotional hold over almost everybody in the UK (Tory MPs and private health executives/shareholders excepted). It inspires almost familial loyalty in that respect.

That is a great strength in retaining staff – but also part of the problem because it gives Tories carte blanche to cut pay and otherwise abuse staff, which leads to the mental health problems that we’re seeing too.

It is vital to point out how this demonstrates the contempt in which the Tories in general – and Barclay in particular – hold NHS staff.

Without that understanding, it would be hard to understand why the Tories are obstructing pay negotiations the way they are.

Source: Nurses’ leader blasts Steve Barclay over ‘disgraceful’ use of legal action to stop strike | Nursing | The Guardian


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Health Secretary won’t go to mediator over junior doctor strike – report

Steve Barclay: he doesn’t know how any of this equipment works and he is attacking the people who do, while the UK’s medical patients go without treatment.

This looks very bad for the Tory government.

The BMA, which represents junior doctors, supports mediation via ACAS. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has intervened to call for it.

But Steve Barclay refuses to accept it – according to The Times. And, unlike the doctors, he wants to impose preconditions on any talks. Why?

Is that really it? Barclay’s afraid that a mediator will oppose him and side with the doctors?

If so, then the cat’s out of the bag and he’ll look bad, whatever he does now.


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Here’s why it is Tory waste – NOT nurses’ strikes – that is harming NHS health care

Tory wasters: Rishi Sunak and Steve Barclay have wasted billions of pounds that could have paid for much more than the pay rises demanded by doctors, nurses and ambulance crews. If they withheld it because they’re trying to steer us towards privatisation, they have failed.

The Conservatives have been paying billions of pounds to private health-related companies for services that have not been provided – while accusing striking doctors, nurses and ambulance staff of jeopardising patient care.

Exhibit A:

From the article:

Experts say the figure is just scratching the surface, with NHS bosses in England having been given the green light to spend up to £10bn on private health companies as part of the government’s plan to reduce the record number of patients waiting for care.

The biggest beneficiary of the outsourcing has been the Australian healthcare multinational Ramsay, which received £134m to offer non-emergency care to NHS patients between 2021 and 2022.

Spire Healthcare, which operates 38 private hospitals formerly owned by Bupa, has been handed a further £108m over the same period. Circle, which is owned by Centene, one of the biggest US healthcare corporations, was paid £50m.

A further 30 private companies, which also include the Nuffield Trust and Specsavers, have been paid £195m in total as part of a contract aimed at boosting the number of patients the NHS treats in England between 2021 and 2022.

The data was obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request to all 42 NHS Integrated Care Boards, which are responsible for spending and managing NHS budgets regionally in England. Only 23 responded to openDemocracy’s request, meaning the total cost could be significantly higher.

But the number of patients being treated has not recovered even to pre-Covid-19 levels:

Between January and November 2022, the NHS treated 6.6% fewer patients from elective care waiting lists than it did over the same period in 2019, according to an analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

The think tank said in February that the NHS was “clearly lagging” behind its target to increase the number of people it is treating to around 30% above pre-pandemic levels by 2024/25.

Exhibit B:

From the article:

The department spent £8.9bn during 2020-21 and another £6bn last year on such supplies, including masks and gowns for NHS staff that have proved unuseable and are now being burned.

The sums were revealed in the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) annual accounts and report for 2021-22, published on Thursday, and highlighted in a highly critical assessment issued by the National Audit Office (NAO).

The DHSC’s report also disclosed that it expects to spend £319m storing and disposing of PPE which is no longer needed and is of such poor quality that it is no use to frontline staff anyway.

In March last year it was still spending £24m a month storing the infection-preventing equipment, the NAO said.

On the subject of storage, there’s this:

Exhibit C:

From the article:

i analysis of figures provided by NHS bodies showed that strikes by junior doctors, nurses, ambulance and other health workers have already led to 665,000 cancelled appointments or operations.

NHS Providers in March said 140,000 appointments were postponed due to nurses and ambulance workers walking out between December and mid-March.

NHS England said the first junior doctors strike last month caused the cancellation of 175,000 operations and appointments.

Up to 350,000 appointments could have been cancelled during the unprecedented four-day junior doctors walkout last week, the NHS Confederation estimated.

Separately, NHS England analysis said the first nurse walkouts on 15 and 20 December caused the cancellation of almost 30,000 operations and appointments.

This is not justification for government investment in the private sector, though. Quite the opposite.

Let’s go back to that Open Democracy article for a moment:

Junior doctors are asking for a 35% pay rise to reverse 15 years of below-inflation wage increases.

The BMA calculates that the net cost of the pay rise for the government would be £1.03bn – a tenth of the potential spending on private healthcare companies. Even the £500m spent last year could have funded an 8% uplift in junior doctor wages for the year in question.

Add nurses and ambulance staff to the calculation and bringing their pay up to parity with 2008 or 2010 levels would still cost a fraction of what Rishi Sunak and his government have wasted – let’s be clear on that: wasted – on private health firms that simply do not help.

Exhibit D:

The Tories don’t want to go into talks with preconditions, and won’t talk if strike action is likely. In other words, the only talks they want are if they tell the nurses (and other NHS staff) what they have to take. No union representative will accept those – let’s face it – preconditions. In any case, it is hypocritical of the Tory government to demand preconditions while condemning nurses for having any of their own.

Exhibit E:

From the article:

From a peak of 70 per cent in 2010, overall satisfaction with the NHS has fallen to just 29 per cent – the lowest figure recorded since this question was first asked in 1983. Satisfaction with individual NHS services is at record lows across the board, while satisfaction with social care is the lowest of all with only 14 per cent of the public saying they are satisfied with it.

Yet none of this translates into any appetite for user charging or a different funding model, the first options that some commentators flailing around for a magical solution tend to clutch at. The public’s aspirations seem straightforward: they simply want an NHS that does what it says on the tin and that works. They were highly satisfied with a system that provided this as recently as 12 years ago, and they do not accept that this is too much to ask.

This may come as a huge disappointment to leading Tories, who are generally believed to have spent the last 13 years de-funding the NHS in order to stop it working properly, in the belief that public opinion would swing behind changing to a US-style, insurance-based, privately-run health system.

So what can be done?

Exhibit F:

The article suggests that £30 billion would be needed to support the kind of pay deals NHS workers need. From the Open Democracy article, this seems a lot more than necessary – but let’s consider the options it presents anyway:

Earlier this year I noted the suggestion that £30 billion was required to fund appropriate NHS pay deals and wrote a proposal to address the need to finance this, including the possibility that it simply be added to the deficit, which is wholly plausible. As I suggestsed then… this funding could be addressed as follows:

1) £10 billion could come from the additional taxes paid by those lured back to the NHS by better working conditions and higher pay, and by those lured back having given up on work altogether. The impact of the extra NHS spending on growth elsewhere in the economy is also taken into account in this estimate.

2) At least £5 billion might be raised from taxes paid by those able to return to the workforce either because their own conditions will be sufficiently well managed to allow this or because those that they care for will enjoy better health, letting them return to work.

So, at least half of the funding required will be directly generated from the benefits created by that additional spending. Options for the remaining £15 billion include:

3) A government could simply decide to run a bigger deficit to fund the £15 billion requirement. The impact on the national debt is insignificant.

4) The Bank of England currently has a programme of selling the government debt it owns bought under the quantitative easing programmes that paid for the banking crises of 2008/9, the Brexit crisis of 2016 and the Covid crisis of 2020/21. If £15bn of this programme was cancelled each year and bonds to fund the NHS were sold instead the funding to deliver the healthcare we need could be found. In this case, there would be no net impact on the national debt owned by third parties.

5) National Savings and Investments could issue NHS Bonds in ISA accounts to provide the funding. £70 billion is saved in ISAs each year. Properly marketed, it would be easy to find £15 billion a year this way.

6) Halving the tax reliefs on savings available to the wealthiest 10% of people in the UK each year. At present it is likely that this group enjoy at least £30 billion of pension and ISA tax reliefs each year.

7) Since the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has found that for every £1 spent on tax investigations £18 of additional tax is raised, investing £1 billion in additional funding with HM Revenue & Customs might be enough to recover the funds required for the NHS each year.

8) The rate of capital gains tax in the UK is currently set at half the rate of income tax in most cases. If it was set at the same rate as the income tax rate then the revenue from this tax might double, raising £15 billion a year.

Judging by all this evidence, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that the Tory government has wasted huge amounts of money that could have been used to support real investment in the National Health Service, and is claiming there is no money available now.

But in fact there are many options available to it; ministers are simply refusing to consider them.

So the NHS crisis that has led to the strikes by doctors, nurses and ambulance teams was caused by the Tory government, and the Tories are deliberately withholding the cash necessary to restore the system.

It is Tory waste that has caused the problem; the strikers are simply doing the only thing they can do to raise awareness of it.

 

The doctors and the Doctor: the Time Lord supports the strikers

The Doctor joins the doctors: Peter Capaldi on the picket line.

Acting legend Peter Capaldi, who used to play the lead character in Doctor Who, is celebrating his 65th birthday today – on the junior doctors’ picket line, it seems:

This Site can only applaud.

Mr Capaldi has long supported doctors’ pay struggle, as Vox Political recorded back in 2016:

In 2016, THE Doctor (Peter Capaldi) stood up to support junior doctors in their dispute over pay and conditions.

The sad part is that, seven years on from his original contribution, the junior doctors are no nearer parity with the pay they have lost since the Tories took over the UK government.


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The Livingstone Presumption is now available
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HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
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The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

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