The junior doctors row bubbles on. This time, medics will walk out for five back-to-back days starting on September 12. Predictably, Jeremy Hunt has condemned the strike; and the BMA is blaming Jeremy Hunt.
It’s a bitter and somewhat dull stalemate which will bore many for its endless intransigence. Yet beneath this, it’s clear this latest industrial action will cause chaos: the strikes comes at such late notice that contingency plans put in place before industrial action earlier this year will not have been made. The strike is messier, too, for the increasing remoteness of a sensible compromise being struck. The BMA’s Mark Porter dismissed the 73 concessions made by the Government as ‘completely meaningless’, likening the switches to editing commas and changing a ‘word here and there’. Whilst Jeremy Hunt, in his own interview on Today, talked up those same changes, going on to say there were actually 107 different changes agreed.
Yet what was telling about Porter’s interview, was the absolute enmity with which he regarded Hunt: clear through his refusal to use the Health Secretary’s name and also his focus on what he called the ‘fundamental deception’ Hunt had ‘practised on the British public’.
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