Kemi is right. We must clip the BMA's wings

Telegraph

2 days ago

Kemi Badenoch's announcement that the Conservatives would ban strikes by doctors represents a clear break with the consensus of the recent past. It is a determined response both to the Government's slow progress with NHS reform and to the Employment Rights Bill, which will make it much easier for unions to call damaging public sector strikes.
At present the 'right to strike' – formally an immunity, dating from 1906, from being sued for breach of contract – is almost universal amongst UK employees. The only significant exceptions are the Armed Forces, the police and prison officers. The military are banned from industrial action in every country in the world, and police strikes have been banned here since 1919. Prison officers have at various times had the freedom to strike, but since the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, brought in by the last Labour government as it happens, that right has been removed.
Many countries have wider restrictions on strikes. Civil servants, university staff and many teachers are banned from striking in Germany, for example. Air traffic controllers, fire and rescue workers can't withdraw labour in Czechia. No federal employee can strike in the US, or even belong to a union which asserts the right to strike.
We know that the current Government has made a fetish of international human rights legislation, but the International Labor Organization – to which we are signed up – specifically permits strike bans in 'those services whose interruption would endanger the life, personal safety or health' of the population. This would certainly seem to include our militant resident doctors.
In practice complete bans on striking by doctors – not always and everywhere the most militant of unionists, to be fair – are confined to authoritarian countries such as Saudi Arabia and China. But many more liberal jurisdictions place considerable constraints on the right to strike. In some US states – including New York, Florida and Texas – doctors in public hospitals cannot strike. The same applies in several Australian states, while any industrial action in other states must go through complicated Fair Work Commission procedures. Where doctors' strikes are permitted there are usually requirements for notice and for minimum service levels – the latter is being abolished here by the Employment Rights Bill. In Canada, doctors in some provinces may be obliged to submit to binding arbitration.
Mrs Badenoch justifies her headline-grabbing proposal by pointing to the frequency of resident doctors' strikes and their intransigence in demanding another extraordinary pay settlement despite the government stuffing their mouths with gold last time round. 'The BMA is out of control' she claims. That may also be true of some other militant unions – the RMT is gearing up for more action on our newly-nationalised railways, for example – but they do not generally threaten lives.
I rather doubt that a new Conservative government would completely ban doctors' strikes, an action which would prompt massive opposition from the trade union movement as a whole and no doubt provoke the now-inevitable explosion of lawfare.
But it would certainly be possible to clip the BMA's wings by tightening ballot requirements and reintroducing the power to impose binding arbitration, something which British governments used in the past. More important, however, would be reform to break up the monolithic structure of the NHS. This would have the side-effect of introducing a genuine market for the services of doctors rather than the current bilateral monopoly.
Of course, the prospect of a Conservative government in the near future seems as likely as snow in August. Nevertheless Kemi Badenoch has performed a useful service in opening up debate about the future conduct of industrial relations in the health service, while putting Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting firmly on the spot. Reform should join in the action: we have yet to hear anything of significance about their position on the doctors' strike.
Labour needs to abandon its ineffectual bleating about the moral responsibilities of doctors and get tough with these strikers, who do not have massive public backing: nobody is bashing pans outside their doors these days. Another capitulation to the demands of the BMA will only produce knock-on demands from other NHS workers, threatening both the prospects for genuine health reforms and the country's dire fiscal position.