Striking junior doctors look more greedy and entitled than ever
Trade unions were born in an era in which workers were massively, brutally exploited, doing dangerous, dirty and exhausting jobs for a pittance. Unlike today, many didn’t have the option to skill up or “get on their bike” to look for better wages. But over time, health and safety measures, as well as other economic and political developments, such as a rising minimum wage, have all but annihilated such brutal work. And so the role of trade unions has become more ambiguous.
The rise of self-interested, doctrinaire union superstars, from Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Miners from 1982 to 2002, to Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the RMT rail union since 2021, has only helped weaken the moral justification for much industrial action.
And yet in 2023 we find ourselves in a Britain still crippled with it; a Britain that feels permanently dragged down by the antics of a hypocritical, entitled, and seemingly greedy band of activist-workers. More than a year of strikes across numerous sectors has provided a spectacle ranging from the concerning to the downright ludicrous.
Not all of it has been uncalled for: many people sympathised with striking nurses, for instance, as well as paramedics, ambulance drivers and midwives. By contrast the rail strikes presided over by Lynch have been patently obnoxious and unreasonable.
But perhaps the most unsympathetic bunch of strikers in Britain are the junior doctors who, in choosing to strike again over Christmas and January – among the worst times of year for the space-strapped NHS – seem completely morally unhinged. Indeed, when other sections of the NHS have agreed to deals with the Government, and this lot of young disrupters won’t stop wreaking havoc, it’s hard not to see anything but a campaign of the purest, most ruthless greed.
Hospitals were already fearing another winter crisis when the junior doctors announced their festive action. But unlike the women whose mastectomies may have to be cancelled, will this bunch be eating turkey at home, healthy and smug?
Their fury seems to be at the fact that they are not paid like bankers. I have spoken to numerous consultants about the attitude of their juniors, and they are chilled by what they see. When they were junior doctors, they were also overworked and underpaid relative to other respected professions, but they just got on with it because they were in it for the honour, the calling, the training and the long game, where they would end up being handsomely richly rewarded – especially if they worked hard. But today’s junior doctors appear keener on ring-leading a dangerous politics than practicing medicine.
It is grotesquely ironic that those working hardest to bring Britain’s most socialist institution to its knees appear to be a band of avowed Left-wingers. Then again, like many noisy Left-wing activists, such as those in the environmental movement, they might just be spoiled brats.
Take Robert Laurenson, a co-chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee who attended Sevenoaks, an independent school in Kent. Earlier this year, he couldn’t join his fellow trade unionists on the picket line because he’d decided to go on holiday for a week. Vivek Trivedi, a fellow co-chair, seems no more serious a figure, rapping his Left-wing credo to the beats of Dr Dre and encouraging weird crab memes to inspire other junior doctors in their uprising.
Still, I wanted to make sure that the mixture of disgust and concern many of us feel watching the antics of the junior doctors is fair. So I spoke to a highly experienced NHS source, who has in the past defended the strikes of nurses and even some of the previous junior doctor actions.
This time, she takes a different view. “It’s the most dangerous move yet,” she said. “Truly compromising safety in a way we haven’t seen before. They chose this time to strike knowing full well that those that usually cover may well be on much-needed leave.
“Not only is this deliberately causing harm, it’s impacting on the well-being of their senior colleagues who will miss out on Christmas with their families in some cases, and much needed rest following the previous industrial action.”
The junior doctors strike represents so much that has gone wrong. It shows the shift in values in Gen-Z away from hard work, eagerness to learn, and willingness to experience momentary discomfort for a long-term benefit or because it’s the right thing to do. It displays a rising entitlement – a work-shy attitude mixed with an appetite for trouble-making, all glued together with a third-rate Leftist ideology.
The strike also highlights the depth of the rot in our public services more generally. It’s not just that you can’t go to hospital and expect consistent service: even train service wasn’t guaranteed for those travelling home for Christmas this year.
We are long past the teetering stage: we’ve fallen off the cliff, and only a massive, very robust parachute of better ideas and a moral backbone can stop us plummeting to the bottom of the ravine, and smashing into a million pieces.
