In December, resident doctors entered into their third round of strike action of 2025 against pay erosion, worsening conditions, and a lack of jobs for doctors.
This strike went ahead despite a conniving attempt by Wes Streeting to turn public opinion against the strikers – accusing the union of “juvenile delinquency”, “reckless” behaviour, and “wilful casualness to inflict pain”.
Evidently, ‘slimy Wes’ – who lacks any kind of clinical training – only succeeded in rubbing salt in the doctors’ wounds. 83 percent of resident doctors voted against Streeting’s paltry offer, which in the words of the BMA’s Jack Fletcher “did not increase the overall number of doctors working in England and did nothing to restore pay for doctors.”
As the BMA further pointed out, that 83 percent vote was a far higher mandate than Streeting ever received!
Militancy
The mood at a BMA picket line in Bristol, visited by Revolutionary Communists, was one of striking frustration at the situation in the NHS.
Most strikers told us they downed the scalpel because of the lack of jobs. This is no surprise, given 20,000 qualified doctors have been left without a specialty training post this year!
As one emergency medicine doctor explained, fourteen applicants were turned away from each A&E training job this year. Yet emergency departments are left short-staffed, with night-shifts regularly running on half the number of doctors needed for safe care.
Meanwhile, patients are left waiting over thirty hours for a bed on a ward, crammed into corridors next to vending machines or in disused X-ray rooms.
A lack of basic equipment adds to this pressure in the hospitals. A second-year doctor we spoke to said “it’s all the smaller stuff too that adds up. The office on our ward has six doctors – but only one working computer”.
This comes at a time when the pressure facing health services is at an all-time high, with waiting lists ballooning and patients left unable to get GP appointments. One striker correctly identified this as a symptom of austerity – pointing out that rising poverty, lack of adequate housing, and cuts to social care all lead to a snowballing need for healthcare.
As one picket asked: “who’s gaining from this system?”. It’s certainly not the workers!
“Not just the figurehead, but the whole establishment”
Many workers spoke about the need to direct more funds for healthcare, but were also concerned that the money won’t be found in the government’s coffers. We say that the money is certainly there: in the private accounts of the billionaires and profits of the banks.
This fight is therefore clearly not limited to better pay and conditions for doctors: it is a fight for the very survival of our healthcare system. Nor is it just directed towards Wes Streeting: in the words of a psychiatry trainee, “it’s not just the figurehead, but the whole establishment.”
Doctors alone cannot take this fight to the establishment: to do so requires uniting workers across the healthcare sector, fighting side by side on the picket lines.
In turn, the fight for the NHS must aim for the expropriation of the billionaires and the bankers, putting to use their vast resources – with an NHS under workers’ control – to provide patients with the care they need, and healthcare workers with the conditions they deserve.
