Wes Streeting’s divide and rule tactics may have won against the doctors – but more strikes are coming | Polly Smythe

WThousands of ambulance workers sparked a strike on December 21, 2022 to require better remuneration and conditions, then the secretary in the shadow of health, Wes Street, was not shy to emphasize who was responsible. In their refusal to negotiate, he tweeted, Rishi Sunak and Steve Barclay had pushed the NHS staff to strike, leaving the patients “undoubtedly who is to blame for this chaos”.

Three years and a general election later, the surgical slipper is firmly on the other foot. Resident doctors – formerly known as junior doctors – have just finished a five -day strike, demanding a 29% salary increase in the coming years. Among the signs on stake lines, calling for “restoration of remuneration” and at the end of “cuts so deep that even a surgeon could not repair it” were printed copies of the stting tweet.

No more relaxed attitude displayed by the Secretary of Health towards the British Medical Association (BMA) in 2024, when he concluded an agreement with doctors who put them on a “trip to pay catering”. He described this latest strike as a “gift to Nigel Farage” and urged resident doctors to cross the stake lines and join their colleagues “always presenting themselves at work”. He described the strike not only as “reckless”, but as an action which “enormously undermines the entire union movement”.

The secretaries general of the union quickly retaliated, Dave Ward of the union of communication workers calling for “shameful” stress comments, and the French and commercial union of the public and commercial secretary of “Carping in the Murdoch Press” instead of negotiating regulations. For a government whose relationship with organized work has so far been largely harmonious – with the exception of the suspension of Angela Rayner’s unit above the Birmingham Bin strikes – the BMA denunciation by stting came to fight with the unions. Has the government shot the arcs?

In front of it, the row may seem to be the first real sign of confrontation between work and unions, it is worth looking closely at what is going on. The underlying intervention of Streting is a number of factors that make BMA an easy target for a government that wishes to show that it can be difficult for unions and not in the pocket of its “Union Paymasters”.

The BMA is not affiliated with work, and it is not part of the union congress, which makes the institutional link of work with it. There is also the fact that resistance to the strike does not only come from the government side: other health unions have expressed discomfort with regard to existing deviations in the PAY offers of the NHS. Last month, the Royal College of Nursing described the government’s decision to award resident doctors an increase in salary of 5.4% while offering nursing staff 3.6% “grotesque”.

In a video published on X on the strike, Streetting plays in these divisions in the movement, attaching tensions between resident doctors and other NHS workers. He speaks of “working hard with … staff who are not paid as much as doctors to make sure that your salary and your career progress and the conditions you work are also good for you”.

Add to that older consultants and health professionals who have had their say: that a strike “would still decrease the NHS capacity to deliver”, that “it is too early to leave”, or simply that resident doctors are “very greedy”.

Then, there is the drastic pace by the conservatives – both in the government and the opposition – on the right on industrial issues, Kemi Badenoch proposing this week to prohibit doctors from taking strike measures, by putting them under the same rules that apply to the police, prison agents and soldiers. This approach gives more space to present itself as hard but reasonable.

It is not to defend Streting, which is probably more than happy to use a striking action to justify a new privatization of the NHS. Nor is it to undermine how his comments are exasperated for those who stand out on strikes. A doctor described them as “slap in the face”, while another asked where the Street of 2022 had left: “He made good points.”

But the conviction of the government of the strike does not necessarily reflect a broader change in its strategy towards the unions. In the midst of frantic attacks by conservatives and their media allies on the link of work with unions, the reality of the relationship is too often drowned. This makes it more difficult to understand the key dynamics: these are probably the transport unions that the government hopes to undertake, not only industrially but politically.

It is also more difficult to identify how the various industrial unions priorities inform their relationship with the government. With a large part of the bill on labor rights left to secondary legislation, the secretaries general always have eyes on the price of satisfying their sectoral needs, whether in unison which puts pressure for fair salary agreements or the shop of the store, distributive workers and allies for zero hour contractual reform. Then there is the fact that there are people in work who are looking forward to kissing the minds of the 1980s and launching a frontal attack against the movement.

The country is once again faced with the prospect of an industrial action in the general public sector, nurses and teachers are potentially ready to join the action of strike. A decade of remuneration, inflation and increase in the cost of repressed living disputed the idea that the wages of certain professions are always guarantees of good life. On a basic starting salary of £ 38,831 and salted with up to £ 100,000 of student debt, it is no longer enough for new recruits of resident doctors to simply wait to earn more at a distant time in the future.

Although there are specific grievances for the strikes of resident doctors – a shortage of specialized training positions and having to spend thousands of books on examination fees, courses and equipment such as stethoscopes – many of their concerns are done deeply through movement. Tenacious mountains of student debt, housing costs which completely eclipse wages and public ruin services which lead to working conditions are not specific to the BMA.

For this dispute, the work has used inter -United tensions compared to the wages of the NHS – as well as the obsolete idea that all resident doctors are middle class professionals – as a political opportunity to dodge the blame for the strike. But this strategy will not work for all strikes. While public sector disorders continue to take place, the government’s battle with the unions may well start seriously.