Giles Sheldrick4-5 minutes 7/5/2026
Labour has caved into striking union demands for more pay – but the misery is set to continue.
OPINION
Health Secretary James Murray (Image: Getty Images)
It’s a miracle. Praise be. Labour has cured the NHS. No more strikes!
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He said: “This is very good news for resident doctors, patients and the NHS as a whole, allowing us to draw a line under the disruption of previous months and focus on getting on with the job of rebuilding our health service.”
Junior doctors, now called resident doctors, an irony if there ever was one, have downed tools and deserted those in need during 16 rounds of strikes totalling 65 days over three years. It is by any measure an appalling dereliction of duty.
In doing so they have held a gun to patients’ heads in their pursuit of more money.
This disruption, pain, and misery has been orchestrated by the militant British Medical Association.
And the fact they are back at work, for now at least, is a bitter pill to swallow.
BMA members on strike earlier this year (Image: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire)
Not only will it cost taxpayers – the very people these strikes have harmed – a small fortune it has also shown Labour for what it is: pathetically weak and dancing to unions’ tune. Worse, there is no guarantee this is the end. Quite the opposite in fact.
The BMA voted to accept a new pay deal that will see taxpayers fund an average pay rise of 6.6% by April next year.
Not bad. Especially as it comes on top of the 29% hike these doctors have received since they first flounced off in March 2023.
Just think about what abandoning the very people they are supposed to care for has meant.
Each day of strike action cost the NHS £50 million.
Labour says resident doctor pay will be 35.2% higher on average compared to four years ago.
Labour’s logic is this: “The cost of settling this dispute is a fraction of the cost of ongoing industrial action by resident doctors and prevents thousands of appointments and procedures being cancelled on each day of strike action.”
The highest-paid are set to pocket more than £100,000 a year. A new wage structure means they will also receive pay rises twice a year throughout training as well as being reimbursed for exam and membership fees for professional organisations.
Starting salaries for resident doctors will rise from £38,831 to £41,226.
There are approximately 4 million workers represented by 11 trade unions affiliated with the Labour Party. And you can bet your life that all will be thinking: “I’ll have a bit of that, thank you very much.”
This settlement is not the good news for patients, or Britain, that Labour is desperate to have you believe. In fact it is a strikers’ charter.
Labour has caved in, paving the way for more inflation-busting public sector pay rises that the country simply cannot afford.
If anyone seriously thinks this rolling programme of deeply dangerous strikes is over then they need to take some medicine.
A ballot of 33,000 BMA members saw just over half back this deal but 47% want more industrial action.
The reservoir of goodwill towards the NHS in general, and resident doctors in particular, has run dry.
Yet the belligerent BMA continues to hold patients to ransom as they salivate over the prospect of more cash arguing that pay is one fifth behind where it believes it should be.
The resident doctors committee said strikes will return if the union is not given another 26% to restore pay to where it think it should be.
Running a health service like this really is enough to make you sick, isn’t it?