Tag Archives: doctors

One rule for them: shocking government double-standard over pay is revealed

Under a cloud: considering the number of MPs who work long hours on multiple secondary jobs, it’s a wonder any of them ever have time to set foot in this place at all.

Once again Rishi Sunak is undermined by the behaviour of his own MPs.

In the week he insisted that a below-inflation, six per cent pay rise for junior doctors (meaning it is a real-terms pay cut) is not negotiable, the obscenely inflated amounts his fellow Tories (and a couple of others) earn from secondary employment have been revealed.

And some MPs are saying they need the extra cash from these second jobs because they can’t make ends meet otherwise.

Their MP salaries put these people among the highest-paid in the UK and they still reckon they can’t live without having more. They cannot justify this while pushing down pay for public sector workers including the junior doctors.

Here’s Sunak, follow by commentary that puts him right in his place by the great Peter Stefanovic:

The pay imposition means that, depending on their experience, junior doctors will receive a raise of between £3,000 and £3,700 per year (rising to £32,300 and £43,900 respectively).

If that seems like a lot, bear in mind that these are highly-skilled jobs for which they spend many years in training.

MPs, on the other hand, are unskilled; you don’t need any training for the job – you just need to persuade people to elect you.

Then you receive £86,584 a year as your basic wage (this is the figure as of April 2023), rising to £167,391 (as far as I can tell) if you are prime minister Rishi Sunak.

This puts him in the top one per cent of earners – and all MPs in the top two per cent.

And still they want more.

Sky News has published an exhaustive list of MPs’ earnings from second jobs, and it is a catalogue of greed, with those who have held ministerial jobs among the top earners. Now why would that be…?

The article states:

MPs with second jobs have an average wage of £233 per hour, Sky News can reveal.

The typical rate for MPs is 17 times the national average – and over 22 higher than the minimum hourly wage.

Indeed. According to the pay deal Sunak is determined to impose, junior doctors will get just £14 per hour, which is only slightly better than the absolute minimum wage.

Ms Truss’s most lucrative work since leaving Number 10 has been a speech in Taiwan. She was paid at a rate of £20,000 per hour – nearly 1,500 times the UK average hourly wage – for her insights into global diplomacy.

Even higher than Ms Truss is Boris Johnson, who resigned as an MP last month. His hourly rate comes in at £21,822, but having left parliament, he is free to work without having to publicly record his earnings.

The leaderboard of the MPs with the 20 highest hourly rates in this parliament reveals a clear pattern: 18 have government experience, suggesting a ministerial background is valued by some employers.

Or it means employers have been paying them in order to influence their decision as ministers?

Here’s Sky‘s Sam Coates explaining it:

Let’s have a look at the list.

Top is Boris Johnson (Conservative) – now an ex-MP after one Partygate scandal too many. He worked 117 hours outside Parliament and earned £2.5 million. That’s £21,800 per hour.

Then:

Liz Truss (Conservative): 12 hours, £189,200, £15,700 per hour.

Alok Sharma (Conservative): four hours, £20,000, £5,000 per hour.

Theresa May (Conservative): 622 hours – that’s nearly 12 solid working weeks! £2.7 million, £4,400 per hour.

Fiona Bruce (not the broadcaster)(Conservative): 245 hours, £733,100, £2,900 per hour.

Sajid Javid (Conservative): 174 hours, £412,300, £2,300 per hour.

Julian Smith (Conservative): 67 hours, £147,800, £2,100 per hour.

Greg Clark (Conservative): 14 hours, £17,770, £1,200 per hour.

Ian Blackford (Scottish National Party): 31 hours, £38,120, £1,200 per hour.

Michael Gove (Conservative): three hours, £3,100, £1000 per hour.

The next 10 are all Conservatives, most notably including Sir Geoffrey Cox at 12 (2,560 hours, £2.4 million, £960 per hour). This means he worked nearly 49 weeks solidly for other employers than Parliament. Has he actually turned up to represent his constituents at all? Even if he has, how can he be expected to have done a good job, working full-time for other employers?

And Jacob Rees-Mogg is at 18 (123 hours, £92,910, £750 per hour).

Some MPs are saying they need multiple jobs because the current salary isn’t enough for them. One can only agree with Richard Burgon:

Nor does our democracy need Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who earns almost as much in a week as many of us do in a year, and wants employers to push your wages through the floor. Here’s Jon Trickett:

Yes it is. “Do as I say – take home rapidly-decreasing remuneration for the grinding hours of hard work that you do, while I spend increasingly less time in the job where I’m supposed to represent your best interests so I can moonlight for the big corps and earn 17 times as much as you.”

Put like that, do you think you’re getting value for money from your Tory MP?

I don’t.

Note this also:

Now consider this:

These are the kind of people we need in Parliament. But Keir Starmer is doing his best to purge Labour of its left wing in order to make it into his dream: a Substitute Tory Party (STP). The SNP is incapable of forming a government because it would never have enough MPs. And the Green Party is habitually ignored by voters who think they have to support Labour or the Tories because their choice is the only one they think can keep the other one out.

Without better representation, the situation described by Robert Peston below will worsen:

Finally: the information provided in this article is vital for anybody in the UK who has a vote. It tells you what you need to know in order to make an informed decision when you come to vote. But I can predict that only around 200 people will read it.

This is because Vox Political must depend on the social media platforms for articles to be seen, and they are run by corporations that depend on other corporations’ advertising revenue to make their own profits, and fear regulation by a right-wing government that wishes to suppress dissenting viewpoints. So of the 42,000+ people who supposedly like This Site’s page on Facebook, only around 300 will actually see the link to this article on their newsfeed.

This is how Sunak, Bailey and the other greedy fatcats keep you down:

By making sure you don’t know how to impose change.

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Junior doctors’ strike day three: time for some righteous anger?

Their reason for striking: and its the only image I currently have of striking junior doctors (sorry).

I wish I had seen this clip earlier. It says everything about the government’s side of the junior doctors’ strike:

“You’ve done bugger-all about it. People have died, and all you’ve done is nothing.”

That’s a pretty good summary of Health Secretary Steve Barclay’s behaviour all round, really, isn’t it?

So, Thursday (April 13, 2023) was the third day of the latest junior doctors’ strike. And what happened?

Well, I’m going to cheat a bit, but this circular video happened, and it makes a fool of Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is always good when you consider he’s in line to lose his Parliamentary seat at the next election.

Take a look:

Also cheating: Jonathan Pie resurrected an old video that has become relevant again. Here it is:

On the other side, here’s Keir Starmer, sitting on his Parliamentary salary that is as near to parity with its 2010 level as makes no difference, telling junior doctors to accept their 35 per cent pay cut and get stuffed:

All right, nit-pickers. With the derisory two per cent the government has offered, it’s a 33 per cent pay cut. A whole third of the value of what they were being paid a few years ago, before the Tories slithered into government again.

And Starmer supports that cut.

There’s trouble in his home camp, though:

On the other hand, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer (she’s based in Bristol, This Writer’s original home town) has been on the picket lines with strikers. She said:

“Junior doctors are absolutely right to call for their pay to be restored to pre-austerity levels. Most people clearly agree that it is unacceptable for junior doctors to work ever longer hours while being asked to accept a real terms pay cut. A new poll shows 54% of the public back junior doctors taking action, while only 26% oppose.

“Years of government underfunding has pushed the NHS to breaking point and resulted in poor pay, thousands of unfilled vacancies, declining working conditions, overworked staff, and stretched capacity. Strike action by junior doctors and other health service workers is the inevitable consequence.

“The Green Party is committed to a properly funded NHS. We would increase investment by at least £6bn each year and ensure junior doctors and other health workers are decently paid. And to tackle the fact that one in three hospital beds in parts of England are occupied by patients well enough to be discharged but unable to access social care, we would also provide free social care.”

There’s this, too:

Staying at the picket lines, when a junior doctor was told the 35 per cent pay parity demand was “eye-wateringly huge”, he pointed out (rightly) that while nurses were being balloted on a much smaller pay offer, he and his colleagues have not (yet) been offered anything.

It really highlights the fact that Steve Barclay continues to be missing.

Where is he? Why isn’t he doing his job and trying to find a solution to the strike?

While all this has been going on, other issues have been raised on the social media, such as…

Also:

And this puts it all well into context:

Looking at it in the round, we can see that the Conservatives are faring appallingly badly, without even a spokesperson to put forward any argument they might have for cutting the pay of some of the most useful people in UK society while keeping their own unreasonably high.

The Labour Party seems divided, with the leader parroting a Tory/Establishment view that restoring doctors’ pay is unreasonable (while pocketing his own unreasonably high salary) while MPs on the party’s back benches are entirely supportive of the strikers.

And the Green Party is raking in the benefits from the failures of the two main parties, with wholehearted support for the junior doctors and their struggle.

Meanwhile, public support for the doctors continues to grow, with more than half of us supporting them. How long can the Tories continue pushing their unreasonable position?

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Keir Starmer’s latest announcements offer us NOTHING

Keir Starmer: a flag and a fancy haircut are no substitute for political policies that might help people.

Keir Starmer took the opportunity of an LBC radio appearance to tell junior doctors and refugees that he doesn’t support them against the government.

Who does he help, apart from himself? Good question.

Responding to a junior doctor who asked whether a Labour government would provide full pay restoration – bring pay back up to the level enjoyed under Gordon Brown’s New Labour administration – he said he could not make that promise, but he was grateful for what junior doctors do and wanted them to know he was on their side.

That doesn’t pay the bills.

And, challenged on what he would do for asylum-seekers, he said putting them into concentration camps on military bases was unavoidable, and did not put forward any alternative ideas to relieve the pressure that has been created by the failure of the Tories to address the issue in any meaningful way.

What was his message to the voters of the UK?

It was simply this: he offers us nothing.

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How is the PM candidate who wanted to slash doctors’ pay by 10% going to stop them quitting?

Liz Truss: does she want to help NHS doctors – or harm them?

Liz Truss reckons she’s going to stop doctors from leaving the NHS – a far cry from her plan in 2009 when she wanted to cut their pay by 10 per cent, a sure-fire way to send them packing.

The Tory leadership candidate reckons she will change conditions relating to doctors’ lifetime pension cap – the amount they can save into a pension tax-free.

Once they hit that cap – currently frozen at £1 million until 2026 by Rishi Sunak – they face costly tax bills in they continue working full-time. So a recent poll showed that nearly seven in 10 surgeons had reduced their workload as a result.

Doctors cannot opt out of paying into their pensions, even after hitting the cap – hence the problem of high tax bills if they continue working full-time.

One wonders how many doctors would be wooed by Truss’s plan if it was put into practice in tandem with her 2009 plan to cut doctors’ pay by 10 per cent.

She avoided answering a question about this – by attacking the BBC – during an interview conducted by Alastair Stewart on GB News.

He mistakenly said the report in which she made the suggestion – for the think tank Reform – had been published in 2019.

Truss corrected him, then said: “I always thought you had high-quality standards at GB News… It’s not the BBC, you actually get your facts right.”

That sideswipe drew a wave of laughter and allowed her to avoid what could have been a difficult question.

But here’s a question that deserves an answer: if Liz Truss was prepared to do the dirty on doctors in 2009, how can we expect her to do right by them now?

Source: Liz Truss: I’ll halt NHS doctor exodus

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Racist candidate to be NHS England boss wants to clear ‘foreigners’ out of the service

Dido Harding: now we find she’s a racist as well as a Tory money pit and expertise vacuum.

This is blatant kite-flying.

Dido Harding has suggested a racist employment policy for NHS England, if she gets the job as boss.

She’s probably doing this to gauge whether there are enough ignorant racists in the country to support it – and thereby support the dismantling of the National Health Service in favour of a profit-making business in which your health is a commodity that you can only afford at the right price.

She says – well, read it for yourself:

Dido Harding is vowing to end the NHS’s reliance on foreign doctors and nurses if she becomes head of the health service in England – despite Matt Hancock previously urging a ‘new Windrush generation’ to help fill jobs.

The Tory peer has made ending the ‘prevailing orthodoxy’ that staff are better sourced from abroad part of her pitch to take over from Sir Simon Stevens next month.

However, two years ago Lady Harding penned a report admitting that the NHS must ‘increase international recruitment in the short to medium term’.

You see, the NHS cannot function without doctors, nurses and support staff from other nations. It never could. There aren’t enough home-grown medical staff in the UK and Harding knows it (see the last paragraph of the quote from the Mail, above).

But by omitting to mention that fact, she’s trying to fool you into believing that Johnny (and Janey) Foreigner aren’t needed and shouldn’t be wanted.

Result? If she gets her way, it’ll be the removal of foreign national employees from the NHS and the subsequent collapse of the service.

And you’ll get the blame because you’ll have supported it.

Fortunately, it seems few people do:

I like this idea – praising foreign-born medical staff working within the NHS for their life-saving work:

Of course, Russ added this…

I also like this – NHS staff of foreign origin pointing out the good work that they do, in contrast to … whatever it is Harding claims to get up to:

Will a backlash stop Harding from getting the job?

Probably not…

I mean, take a look at her record (courtesy of Private Eye) and you’ll see a catalogue of disasters – none of which have stopped her from bagging increasingly important and high-paid roles, which she then trashed.

It’s an outrage that Harding is doing this.

So, what are we going to do about it?

Report her for racist hate speech?

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Boris Johnson: don’t let the media make a messiah out of this racist, sexist, cowardly liar

You may have seen some news reports suggesting that contingency plans were made for Boris Johnson’s death of coronavirus – suggesting that his recovery may have been miraculous in some way.

In other words, the Tories and their supine media were trying to cook up a “back from the dead” story for Johnson, painting him as a Messiah-figure who has returned from the brink of the grave to bring strong leadership to a country desperately in need of it.

In other words, they’re trying to feed us another load of old pigswill.

Boris Johnson isn’t a messiah – he’s a sexist, racist, homophobic, cowardly liar.

Remember his Brexit campaign, when he lied that the NHS would be given £350 million a week? That investment might have done us all some good, prior to the coronavirus crisis but it was never going to happen because the Tories have been running the NHS down to make it ripe for privatisation – which would have made the UK even less capable of handling Covid-19.

Remember when he tried to make a joke of the massive loss of lives in the Libyan city of Sirte during that nation’s civil war? Or when he had to be stopped from inappropriately quoting a colonial poem by Kipling in Myanmar?

Remember when Eddie Mair, on BBC Radio 4, read out a litany of Johnson’s racist behaviour, to the dismay of Amber Rudd?

When Johnson refused to condemn widespread police violence against civilians in Catalonia?

When he spoke nonsense about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Parliament, and the Iranian government used it to threaten her with an extra five years in prison, beyond the five she was already serving on a trumped-up charge?

When he was reprimanded by then-Commons Speaker John Bercow for referring to Emily Thornberry in “frankly sexist” terms?

When he praised Viktor Orban on his election win in Hungary after an anti-Semitic campaign?

His sexist and Islamophobic comments about women who wear the burqa?

The £53 million he spaffed on a ‘Garden Bridge’ that was never built?

His cowardice during the Tory leadership campaign when he was the absentee candidate?

The racist poem he published, saying that Scottish people were a “verminous” race that should be placed in ghettos and exterminated?

His racist assessment of the French as “turds“?

The allegation that Downing Street sought to restrict Johnson’s access to sensitive intelligence when he became Foreign Secretary?

The evidence that he met a Russian ex-KGB agent without being accompanied by his personal security detail, which strongly suggested that he was harming the UK’s security in relation to Russia? What happened about the so-called ‘Russia report’, discussing such security issues, that Johnson has been suppressing since before the general election last year?

His reference to gay men as “tank top-wearing bumboys“?

His question about Irish PM Leo Varadkar: “Why isn’t he called Murphy like the rest of them?”

His clueless claim that hard work can cure mental illness?

His relaxed attitude to his MPs abusing women?

His lie that the NHS would get 20 hospital upgrades, starting in his first week as prime minister – that he then edited out of a video?

His illegal attempt to prorogue Parliament?

His obscene description of then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn?

The corruption scandal in which he allegedly gave public money to his friend Jennifer Arcuri? What happened about that, by the way?

The allegation that Boris had taken money for his Tory leadership campaign from a group of hedge fund bosses who planned to make a fortune by getting him to force a “no deal” Brexit? What happened about that, by the way?

His decision to run away when the UK was flooded and needed strong leadership?

His failure to follow his own social distancing rules and subsequent illness with coronavirus? If he had died, it would have been of stupidity.

But he was never in any danger of death – and the people of the UK are registering their disgust at this latest attempt to make fools of us:

The only sane choice is to agree with the sentiment immediately above.

Or are you content to be brainwashed by the BBC?

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If this many doctors are burnt out, then how can the Tories say they are fit to tackle coronavirus?

Knackered: the Tories have run down the NHS to the point where one-third of doctors are exhausted. So they clearly can’t be fit to tackle an epidemic like coronavirus and the Tories are wrong to suggest it.

In all the fuss about coronavirus, it seems we’re all avoiding a very important fact – some of us deliberately:

That’s right. According to the British Medical Journal, one-third of GPs and emergency doctors are exhausted:

Doctors working in emergency medicine and general practice are most at risk of exhaustion, stress, and compassion fatigue, researchers have found.

The study, published in the online journal BMJ Open found that nearly one in three doctors (31.5%) had high levels of burnout, while one in four (26%) had high levels of stress.

So how are they going to mount anything like an adequate response to coronavirus when the Tories have left them in no condition to do so?

Source: Almost a third of UK doctors may be burnt out and stressed, study suggests | The BMJ

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THIS is why the NHS is struggling


Read it and weep:

[Image: Dr Jacky Davis, co-editor of NHS:SOS.]

Any questions?

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Tory immigration plan will cut number of nurses, teachers and care workers


Nice work, you Tory dunderheads.

Only the stupids in the Conservative Party could come up with an immigration plan so idiotic it deliberately makes it more difficult for the UK to recruit badly-needed expertise – because only they are stupid enough not to understand what their stupid plan means.

Let’s make it clear for them:

That’s the Institute of Directors saying this, not some Leftie on the internet.

Let’s narrow it down a little:

And it seems the paper itself is misleading. Here’s Steve Peers:

This is correct. It is currently entirely possible for the UK government to deport anybody who has moved here but failed to find work within six months.

This is why it is important for the so-called Repeal Bill to be opposed, of course.

Yes there are statistics – or were, at least. Migrant workers create a net increase in GDP; they are less of a drain on the state than UK citizens.

 

So there you have it: A document full of nonsense and lies from a party that may actually be stupid enough to believe them.

The Home Office document states its intention clearly enough: to end free movement “in its current form”. It proposes that after Brexit day all newly arrived EU migrants, unless they are highly skilled, will lose their rights to live permanently in Britain. At a stroke they will be turned into temporary workers with a maximum two-year permit.

When the time comes to renew that temporary permit the rules of the game will have changed. By then a new UK immigration policy for EU migrants will have kicked in. That will, it is suggested, include possible numerical caps on those working in lower-skilled jobs. For some occupations, deemed not to be suffering from labour shortages, the door may be closed completely.

Restrictions are also to be imposed on the family members that a post-Brexit EU migrant can bring with them to live in Britain. At present a Briton married to somebody outside the EU cannot bring their spouse to the UK unless they earn £18,600, a threshold described as “particularly harsh but legal”. For the first time this will apply to EU citizens too.

The Home Office wants to go further still. Repealing the jurisdiction of the European court of justice means the UK can also restrict the rights of extended family to live in Britain to only the very closest of relatives: children and adult dependants.

The document also proposes to keep the current light-touch border checks for EU nationals rather than impose a vast new pre-entry visa system. That is probably vital if Britain’s airports and ports are not to grind to a halt the day after Brexit.

Instead all newly arrived EU migrants will be required to register after three or six months for a biometric residence permit for which fingerprints may be required.

Source: Home Office document exposes heart of Theresa May’s Brexit | Politics | The Guardian

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NHS changes – how much power do GPs need, anyway?

This might be controversial but it occurred to me that ‘comedy’ David Cameron and Andrew Lansley have been pinning much of their hopes for the Health and Social Care Bill on a perception that local doctors – GPs in their parlance – are best-suited to direct where spending on healthcare actually goes.

I’m not convinced that’s true. Why are people at the entry-level of the NHS being acclaimed as experts?

I suffer from a condition known as cluster headaches. Every couple of years, I get fast-onset, extremely painful one-sided migraine headaches at a rate of four or more every day, for a period lasting up to three months. It’s a rare condition – only around 50,000 people in the UK get it, which means very little research has been carried out.

When I went to my local doctors’ surgery with it, the GP I saw thought it was just a severe headache and told me to take some aspirin.

Aspirin won’t touch cluster headaches. By the time the drug takes effect, the headache is far too well-entrenched for it to make any difference at all. If I had accepted that doctor’s advice as being the best, most expert diagnosis available, I would have condemned myself to spending a quarter of a year in agony, every two years.

Instead, I went back, got properly diagnosed, and was put on injections of a substance that costs something like £25 a shot – which also raises questions about how much GPs will be willing to spend on a patient when they hold the budget.

Mrs Mike has a condition whereby the intervertebral discs – the shock absorbers between vertebrae – at the bottom of her spine have disappeared. There is an operation available on the NHS that would replace these discs with artificial ones, but this was never mentioned to her and I only found out by typing ‘intervertebral discs’ into the search box on the NHS website. Now, there might be a good reason for keeping this from her, but I doubt it.

Now these examples could be shot down by any critic as anecdotal, but there is evidence that this sort of thing is widespread.

Dr Phil Hammond, speaking on the Radio 4 show Heresy, tells us: “If you go to Dr Google, or his friend Professor Wikipedia, you have a 58 per cent chance of getting it right. Doctors are marginally ahead at about 75 per cent.”

And they tend to look up your ailment on the Internet as well! “Doctors use search engines too; it’s quite common for doctors to use Google,” said Dr Hammond on the same show. “If you look at their computer screen, you’ll actually see them typing… I had a mate who was a pain specialist… and he was teaching a junior doctor and a women came in who had Wartenberg’s Neuritis. He was looking at his notes before she came in and said to his junior doctor, ‘Look, I’ve never heard of this; let’s look it up on Wikipedia.’ They look it up, they make notes, and this woman walks in and says, ‘I’m terribly sorry; I was waiting outside and I heard you say to your junior doctor, you’ve never heard of Wartenberg’s Neuritis, you were going to look it up on Wikipedia. I thought I ought to warn you – I’m the person who wrote the entry.”

So we should not be hailing GPs as the experts who need to have control of NHS budgets. They’re not the experts. The experts are the consultants, surgeons or whoever, to whom they pass you if they find they can’t write a prescription to get rid of you.

The Bill must be scrapped. If we let the Tories make fools of us, it may be the last thing we do.