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The head of the doctors’ union has denied he is pursuing further strike action to progress his own political career after the Labour party overlooked him as a prospective candidate for parliament.
The British Medical Association has announced that resident doctors – formerly known as junior doctors – in England will stage another five-day strike from 7am on 17 December until 7am on 22 December.
It will be the 14th strike by doctors since March 2023 and follows a similar five-day action last month, which led to warnings that the NHS may have to cut frontline staff and offer fewer appointments and operations if the strikes continued.
The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has called the move a “cynical attempt to wreck Christmas”, while Dr Chris Streather, a regional medical director at NHS England, said it was “highly irresponsible”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Dr Tom Dolphin, the chair of the BMA, denied he was using the junior doctors to pursue a political cause.
Dolphin acted as the agent for Dawn Butler, the leftwing Labour MP for Brent East, at the 2017, 2019 and 2024 general elections, chaired Butler’s constituency Labour party and applied to be a candidate in 2024 but was not shortlisted.
“My political career isn’t the relevant thing here,” Dolphin said. “I’m here representing a trade union. Trade unions are a force for good in society. They’re about workers coming together to demand fair treatment. They’re why we’ve got paid sick leave and paid maternity leave. They’re why we’ve got safety regulations at work. They’re why we’ve even got the weekend. And I’m here representing a trade union. That’s the purpose of me being here.
“We’ve got resident doctors coming together to demand fair treatment, to demand the opportunity to be able to train in the UK and to become specialists, become GPs, and they’re not currently being given that. They have repeatedly asked the government for that and they’re not being given that opportunity. That’s why we’re back on strike again.”
Pay for resident doctors has risen almost 30% over the past three years, including by 22% under Labour. The BMA argues doctors need a further 26% increase over the next few years to make up for the erosion in their pay in real terms since 2008.
Earlier on the programme, Streather said the strike would harm patients. “It’s eroding the goodwill towards resident doctors that comes from other staff – from consultant staff, from nursing staff and other clinical staff – but also from the public. And in the long term it’s not going to help the high regard with which the profession’s held by the public. So it’s highly irresponsible,” he said.
Dolphin said thousands of doctors had been turned away from internal medicine training posts and there were more than 30,000 doctors competing for about 10,000 places this year. He said UK medical graduates should be prioritised for training posts in the future.
On Monday night, Streeting said the BMA was threatening strikes at the busiest time of the year without having had a single conversation with the government.
“These strikes are in no one’s interest and there is no moral justification for them,” he said. “Resident doctors should ignore the BMA’s attempts to turn them into the Grinch who stole Christmas. My door has always been open. I have never walked away from the table and I stand ready to do a deal that puts patients first this Christmas.”
