How long will Streeting hold out against the most militant union in the land?
During a recent protracted dispute they stopped work 11 times and forced the cancellation of an estimated 1.5 million appointments. It is unconscionable that the BMA is now prepared to inflict further misery on the public, most of whom have not seen anything like the pay rises enjoyed by its members. The doctors profess to cherish the NHS, yet by their actions they cut away at its ability to cope with financial and population pressures.
When appointments are cancelled or operations postponed, patients have to go back to square one, often involving another trip to a GP for their treatment to be rescheduled. How many drop out at that point? The backlog of cases remains above seven million with no chance of a significant reduction if there is another dispute. The public, who might have had some sympathy for the doctors in the past, have evidently lost patience judging by recent opinion polls.
Labour has made a rod for its own back by giving inflation-busting pay rises to others in the public sector. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, made much of the Tory failure to settle this dispute when he was in opposition. Now the boot is on the other foot. How long will he hold out against the most militant union in the land?
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
26 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
JOHN MACLEOD: What this Clydeside giant could teach the political pipsqueaks of today
It's a Glasgow shipyard: July 30, 1971. It's muggy, with men everywhere – thousands huddling in around the platform, hanging on Jimmy Reid's every word. Still not 40, assured, fluent, neatly suited and be-tied. Like an achingly cool teacher – and enjoying himself. 'We are not going to strike,' he carols. 'We are not even having a sit-in strike. Nobody and nothing will come in, and nothing will go out, without our permission. 'And there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying' – there is warm laughter – 'because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, with dignity, and maturity.' Jimmy Reid's moment at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in is still one of Scotland's greatest hits. Up there with Jim Baxter running rings around England's World Cup-winning side. Archie Gemmill's goal in Argentina; Rikki Fulton's Supercop pulling up Taggart himself. The 'work-in' – occasioned because, in 1971, the Heath administration would not advance a £6million loan to keep the yards, with their full order books, ticking through a tight spot – was brilliantly framed. Not your usual strike, occupation or demo. But based on the blazing concept of the right to work, not merely the right not to be made redundant – not just the rights of one riveter, but those of an entire community. In an instant it captured the public's imagination. The likes of Matt McGinn and Billy Connolly rolled into Govan, Scotstoun and Yoker to entertain the lads. Donations poured in from the public. There was even a £5,000 cheque from John Lennon. Trounced in the court of public opinion, Heath blinked first. The government caved – and, thanks to Jimmy Airlie (the strategist) and Jimmy Reid (the rhetorician) two of the yards thrive to this day. Both men were stalwarts of the Communist Party. Indeed, Reid was a Clydebank councillor and, when he stood for Dunbartonshire Central in the February 1974 General Election, many thought he would be our first Communist MP since Willie Gallagher. It was an extraordinary era when, though Labour had many more members in Greater Glasgow, the Communists had far more activists. And – as the men of my late father's blue-collar Free Church congregation often told him (for the most part, wiry Lewismen) Communist shop stewards and officials served them far better than the Labour jobsworths. They listened. They cared. Indeed, they were weirdly Presbyterian. They spoke with the certitude of a preacher; their cadences – and Jimmy Reid, really, was our last great platform orator – echoed the Scottish Metrical Psalms and the King James Bible. Born in Govan in 1932, Reid's formal education ended at 14. He served briefly and unhappily in a stockbroker's office, found his metier as a shipbuilding engineer, joined the League of Labour Youth, and drifted rapidly to the Communist Party even as, bright and curious, he took avidly to lifelong learning. This was a world of dignity and structure that has all but gone. Boys did not just learn a trade; they learned to be men. There was constant discussion and debate, from which sparks flew and leaders emerged. A wider community – some 20,000 supply-chain jobs depended on those shipyards, as well as the 8,000 immediately employed – sat on the shoulders of strong women, family values, corner shops and churchgoing. And a planet away from the graffitied, heroin-addled drear to which much of West-Central Scotland is reduced today. That merry – if dignified – oration was not even Reid's greatest speech. In 1972, he was installed as Rector of Glasgow University. His address would win headlines all over the world and was even printed, verbatim, in the New York Times. 'From the very depth of my being,' Reid declared, 'I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable…' His theme was alienation: a warning against blind pursuit of personal success, regardless of the consequences for others. 'Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement…' It was, someone said, the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address. Yet only fragments of video and audio survive. This week, Reid's daughter Eileen, 66, has called for it all to be restaged and reinvented digitally, with the aid of artificial intelligence. For all Jimmy's ability, abundant charm and iron-clad integrity, he would never secure a national platform on which to stand. Time and again he lost elections for high union office. He slipped into the Labour Party, and stood against SNP incumbent Gordon Wilson at Dundee East in 1979. But terrified Tories in Broughty Ferry and so on voted tactically for Wilson, dreading anyone straight out of the Communist Party, and Reid was defeated. He would have the ear of Neil Kinnock, but could not win the trust of the wider Scottish Labour movement. He was thought too clever by half; too prone to unpredictable announcements, too thoughtful to be a knee-jerk supporter of every last, fashionable Left-wing cause. In 1984 he slammed the smuggest of union barons for the betrayal of his members: 'Arthur Scargill's leadership of the miners' strike has been a disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. 'He will have destroyed the NUM as an effective fighting force within British trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader.' It wowed the country – but appalled the comrades. From 1994, disillusioned, Reid moved away from Blair and New Labour. In 2001, he founded the Scottish Left Review; in 2005, he joined the SNP. In August 2010, Reid, 78, was felled by a brain haemorrhage. He was quintessentially a youth of the 1940s. Immaculately groomed, formally dressed and with the poise of Hollywood, Jimmy Reid could have stepped out of a Vettriano painting. Hugh Kerr, sometime Scottish Labour politician, met him for the last time in 2004, when the two addressed a London meeting of United Left MEPs. He recalled: 'At a good lunch afterwards, with his customary brandy and cigar, he said: 'Hugh, you know, there is nothing too good for the working class.' 'For me, he was a deeply human person who loved the good things in life: literature, music and, above all, people.'
Daily Mail
26 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Traders bet on no more rate cuts this year: Blow for borrowers as inflation hits 18-month high of 3.8%
Millions of borrowers were dealt a bitter blow yesterday as soaring inflation shattered hopes of an interest rate cut. Markets are now betting that rates will remain unchanged for the rest of the year after higher air fares, fuel and food prices pushed consumer price inflation to 3.8 per cent, up from 3.6 per cent in June. That was the highest level in 18 months and above forecasts of 3.7 per cent. It means prices in Britain are rising more quickly than anywhere else in the G7 group of advanced economies. And it piles pressure on the Bank of England – and governor Andrew Bailey – which is tasked with keeping inflation at 2 per cent. It is also a blow to Rachel Reeves, whose faltering stewardship of the economy has seen growth slow in recent months and unemployment rise by more than 200,000 since Labour came to power. Experts said the Chancellor's £25billion employer National Insurance raid, as well as a sharp increase in the minimum wage bore much of the blame for the rise in inflation as firms pass on higher costs to consumers. The Bank has already been turning more hawkish as it voted to cut rates to 4 per cent last month by the narrowest of margins. And it has also warned inflation will continue to rise, hitting 4 per cent by the end of this year. Last night, market betting suggested there was a near zero chance of a rate cut next month and just a one-in-four likelihood that the BoE will reduce rates in November. Traders also saw a 56 per cent probability of rates being held in December, meaning borrowers are likely to have to wait until February 2026 for any relief. Fears of persistent inflation have sent UK borrowing costs higher in recent days with yields on 30-year bonds, known as gilts, rising to the highest level since 1998 earlier this week. The sell-off in bonds – whose yields rise as prices fall – has since abated. But UK borrowing costs continue to be higher than those of other advanced economies. Yesterday's inflation figures are likely to have particularly concerned the Bank of England's rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) because of an unexpectedly big jump in services sector prices – a metric that the Bank watches closely. Services sector inflation rose from 4.7 per cent in June to 5 per cent in July. The Bank has been steadily cutting rates since last summer after a bout of spiralling price rises – that saw inflation hit more than 11 per cent – appeared to have been brought under control as it came down to around 2 per cent. But it has since drifted upwards causing doubts that the Bank can continue on the same path. Elliott Jordan-Doak, senior UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said: 'Inflation is set to stay miles above target for the foreseeable future. We expect headline inflation to remain above 3 per cent until April 2026, forcing the MPC to stay on hold for the rest of this year at least.' Expectations that rates will stay higher for longer are likely to have an impact on fixed rate mortgage deals. David Hollingworth, associate director at L&C Mortgages, said: 'Mortgage borrowers have been enjoying a market where rates have been dropping. 'Fixed rates have been pricing in the recent and future cuts, so have been edging down with a host of deals now below 4 per cent. 'Those reductions have tended to come in small increments, but we could see that slow further or even reverse in some cases if the market reacts badly to the threat of higher inflation than was previously expected.'
Daily Mail
29 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Airbus staff plot 10-day strike: Union demands new pay deal amid rising inflation and cost of living concerns
Airbus workers will go on strike next month amid a pay row with bosses in a move that threatens to disrupt the production of plane wings. Thousands of the manufacturer's UK employees will walk out for ten days from early September, trade union Unite said. Unite, which represents more than 3,000 of the company's aircraft fitters and engineers, said 90 per cent of its members voting in the ballot had chosen industrial action. The strikes will go ahead unless the European jet maker presents an improved pay offer amid rising inflation and cost of living concerns, union officials warned. Strikes at the UK sites – including Broughton in Flintshire and Filton, near Bristol – could hamper the firm's plans to step up plane production, from 766 last year to 820 in 2025, amid growing demand. Strike plan: Industrial action at Airbus' UK sites - including Broughton in Flintshire (pictured) and Filton near Bristol - could disrupt wing production for commercial and military aircraft
