With each public utterance, it’s becoming hard to escape the conclusion the British Medical Association is hell-bent on sacrificing patient care on the altar of a militant agenda.
How else does one explain the hard-Left union’s staggering suggestion that not even a 50 per cent pay hike would be enough to stop senior doctors from striking over the summer?
Leave aside that with the whole country currently feeling the pinch, such demands are unreasonable and unaffordable.
And let us disregard too that NHS consultants have already received a 4.5 per cent pay rise last year, taking their average earnings to £128,000, as well as generous changes to their pensions.
With nurses and junior doctors already threatening more walkouts this summer over unresolved pay disputes, the fact remains that, were the NHS’s most experienced clinicians to join them, it would be an act of extraordinary recklessness.
More than half a million appointments and operations have already been cancelled and rescheduled since December due to strikes
No one, least of all this newspaper, underestimates the extraordinary contribution doctors make to society.
But more than half a million appointments and operations have already been cancelled and rescheduled since December due to strikes. Further delays to patient care will only lead to public hostility.
With the ever-belligerent BMA sending out ballot papers, we urge doctors to think again. If they press ahead with these strikes, they will not only be letting down their patients but the fundamental principle of their profession: ‘Do no harm.’
Scandal beyond belief
The devastating blunders which took place inside the Tavistock clinic’s now discredited Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) grow ever more disturbing.
Thanks to whistleblowers, we already know hundreds of patients, some as young as ten, were rushed into receiving life-changing hormonal treatments such as puberty blockers – only for some of them to later change their minds.
Newly obtained documents now reveal Susie Green, former chief of the influential trans charity Mermaids with no known medical qualifications, was able to refer children to the clinic for treatment even when their GPs repeatedly refused.
How such practices could ever have occurred inside a once-respected NHS institution simply beggars belief. More worryingly, a recording emerged last week of one of Tavistock’s most senior doctors, Professor Gary Butler, still appearing to defend how the clinic had been run.
It’s not enough that GIDS has been closed – the perpetrators of this unsettling scandal must also be held accountable.
Labour’s eco-lunacy
Sir Keir Starmer plans to block all future North Sea oil and gas developments
Sir Keir Starmer’s plans to block all future North Sea oil and gas developments displays a woeful disregard towards energy security.
As Dominic Lawson points out opposite, Britain derives two-thirds of its energy from oil and gas – much of it from the North Sea. Cancelling all new exploration and production will simply make us more reliant on less green imports from foreign regimes which could also turn the taps off at any moment, as Vladimir Putin has proved so damagingly.
It would also be an act of economic lunacy which will cost jobs and tax revenues. It appears nothing more than morally vain posturing designed to appease the Just Stop Oil zealots and other members of the hysterical green lobby.
Sir Keir has already indulged the selfish eco-wreckers by opposing laws designed to crack down on their disruptive protests.
By allowing this minority to effectively shape party policy, Labour has shown itself to be on the side of the job destroyers, not the working people of this country.