By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Thousands of UK doctors on Friday started a five-day strike after talks for a new pay increase with the Labour government failed.
They picketed hospitals after negotiations with the government late Thursday failed, as both parties could not reach a compromise.
The move comes after the doctors accepted an offer for pay increase, totalling 22.3 per cent over two years in September 2024, soon after Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour party took power.
Resident doctors, those below consultant level, have said they felt they had “no choice” but to strike again to reverse “pay erosion” since 2008.
Starmer on Friday appealed to the doctors, saying patients were being put at risk and the strikes would “cause real damage”.
Launching a strike “will mean everyone loses,” Starmer wrote in The Times, highlighting the added strain it would put on the already struggling National Health Service (NHS).
He appealed to the doctors not to “follow” their union, the British Medical Association (BMA), “down this damaging road. Our NHS and your patients need you.”
“Lives will be blighted by this decision,” Starmer warned.
The junior doctors, however, say their pay in real terms has eroded more than 21 per cent over the past two decades.
“We’re not working 21 per cent less hard so why should our pay suffer?” the co-chairs of the BMA’s resident doctors’ committee, Melissa Ryan and Ross Nieuwoudt, said in a statement.
Last year’s doctors’ strikes, which saw tens of thousands of appointments cancelled and treatment delayed, were among a series of public and private sector walk-outs over pay and conditions as inflation soared.
Health Minister Wes Streeting also appealed to doctors to reverse their position, saying in a letter published in The Telegraph that the government “cannot afford to go further on pay this year”.
The Rishi Sunak past Conservative government last year resisted the BMA’s demands for a 35 per cent “pay restoration” to reflect real-term inflation over the last decade.
Last year, Labour moved to draw a line under a series of disputes, reaching pay offers to public sector workers including teachers and train drivers.
