NHS and health

To rebuild services: tax the rich!

On Monday 10 July Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt, alongside Bank of England chief Andrew Bailey, assured City plutocrats at a Mansion House dinner that he would hold a hard line against public sector wage claims. He said that was to damp inflation. In fact, conceding to the school workers, the doctors, the rail and Tube workers, and others, would cost a tiny part of the government’s budget. Even if it led to a bigger government deficit, its effect on inflation would be impossible to calculate, and small anyway. And that effect could be reduced to zero, even notionally, by covering the rises from...

Doctors demand pay redress

Junior doctors in England will stage the biggest doctors’ strike ever seen in this country on 13-17 July (ending 7am 18 July). This will be followed by consultants (“senior” doctors in hospitals) striking on 20-21 July. They will organise “Christmas Day” emergency cover. The doctors have called on the government to talk through the official conciliation service ACAS, and ACAS has volunteered that it’s up for that, but the Tories refuse talks unless the doctors first cancel their strikes. In Scotland the BMA junior doctors’ committee is recommending acceptance of what BMA deputy chair Emma...

Junior doctors strike 13-17 July

After three more days of strikes in June to reverse long-running real-terms pay cuts, junior doctors in England will strike for five days this month — 13-17 July. In Scotland they will strike for the first time 12-14 July. The Telegraph reports that the pay review body covering doctors has recommended a 6% rise, plus an additional £1,000 (a pay increase, not a lump sum, it says) for junior doctors specifically. A leading British Medical Association (BMA) junior doctor activist who spoke to Solidarity was sceptical the Telegraph has got it right. Even if it has, and even if the government...

NHS pay: regroup and prepare

The Royal College of Nursing's strike ballot closed on 23 June with a 43.4% turnout. The ballot was aggregated across the whole of England, rather than NHS Trust by NHS Trust, which means that in spite of an 84% yes vote in favour of strike action, the union has not met the 50% threshold needed to renew its strike mandate. There will be no more strikes by RCN members in this year’s NHS pay dispute. Unite still has a mandate for strike action, but it is one of the smaller unions in health, and its ability to sustain a dispute on national pay without other unions is very limited. After the RCN...

Junior doctors keep up the fight

Junior doctors fighting over pay held three more days of well-supported strikes on 14-17 June, with lively picket lines and a march and rally of 1,000 in London. Among NHS workers fighting for a pay rise, junior doctors have so far waged the most determined campaign, both in terms of clarity of demands (they are clear they want a real-terms increase and a timetable for “pay restoration” to 2008 levels) and the number of strike days. But as a junior doctor centrally involved in the dispute explained in Solidarity 676 last week, the current level of action — three days a month, with more of the...

The risks from bird flu

For the past two years a variant of H5N1 avian influenza (bird flu) has been circulating in wild and domestic bird populations. This strain, particularly transmissible and deadly to birds, started in unaffected geese and ducks (migratory birds). The flu variant has not yet spread in humans; measures to guard against that have included six months where farmed birds have been kept inside and a number of other measures affecting animal welfare. A select few strains of influenza (H1 and H3) can infect humans (and pigs), whilst birds are affected by H5 and H7 influenza. Humans can become ill with...

Restarting pay fight is key to rebuilding NHS

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) re-ballot for pay strikes opened on 23 May and runs up to 23 June. As it is an aggregated ballot, every vote will make a difference in getting past the turnout threshold. The NHS Workers Say No group ( linktr.ee/nhsworkerssayno ) and activists in the RCN are again working hard to get the vote out. Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty are doing all we can to support their efforts for a continuation of the fight on pay in the NHS. Although the union leaders are backing a vote for strikes, it looks like they are providing depleted resources. They showed, by...

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