03-08-2025
How Leftists seized control of Britain's doctors' union
The origins of the transformation stretch back to 2020, when a grouping of Corbynite doctors within the union formed the Broad Left coalition. The name stems from a Communist Party strategy to 'capture positions within a union' and take it over. Its logo is a stethoscope arranged to look like a hammer and sickle.
By 2022, the coalition seemed to have increasingly joined hands with a larger group of young activist doctors called DoctorsVote – which is mainly dedicated to winning massive pay rises for resident doctors.
And in the spring of that year, the two groups combined to seize dozens of seats on the BMA council, the union's foremost decision-making body. In a vote to determine the makeup of the council for the following four years, Broad Left/DoctorsVote candidates secured 26 of the 69 places up for grabs.
Since then, their influence has only grown. Indeed, a 2023 Policy Exchange report – 'Professionalism is not relevant' – concluded the union had been 'taken over by young, self-declared 'entryists' in a planned campaign similar to that [orchestrated] in the Labour Party at the time of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership'.
'It is very sad to see what was basically a well-rounded organisation that covered so many issues of importance to a wide range of doctors being hollowed out by the angry activism around residents' pay, Gaza and LGBT issues,' says Mark Pickering of the Christian Medical Fellowship, which counts many BMA members in its ranks. 'It is very similar to the way Momentum took over the Labour Party from the inside. We saw then how people started using democracy to try to dismantle democracy and that's what it seems has happened here.
'You had these two groups come in and they all vote for each other… and that's shifted what happens at the annual meetings, where BMA policy is formed.'
As the union has become ever more of a crucible for Left-wing politics, members appalled by the takeover have begun to leave.
First out the door have been many Jews, who have been dismayed by the union's response to the war in Gaza. Last month veteran doctor Robert Winston told The Telegraph he had resigned as a member of the BMA after 61 years due to a combination of his disgust with the strikes, the union acting 'highly politically' in recent times and its failure to tackle anti-Semitism among doctors.
