𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the double standards within the British Medical Association, Britain’s most militant trade union. At the very moment that the BMA is staging an explosively controversial strike by doctors in support of its demand for a whopping 26% pay increase, its shrill, self-righteous leadership is denounced for treating its own staff badly.

According to its angry critics, the Association is guilty of promoting exactly the same kind of injustice that has led to this week’s walkout across the NHS. The GMB trade union, which represents 75% of workers at the Association’s offices, says it is “nothing short of hypocritical” for the BMA to make a derisory offer of just 2%. If a “credible offer” is not put forward, warns the GMB, members will be “balloted for industrial action”.

The BMA has brought this crisis on itself. Bent on confrontation with the Government, its bosses have created a culture of self-indulgent entitlement, reckless greed, and contrived victimhood. With a brazen contempt for both decency and their professional oaths, the strikers have timed their stoppage for the depth of midwinter to maximise the risks to patients.

Never in modern times has a strike been less justified. These are well-paid professionals who later in their careers could easily be earning more than £150,000-a-year. Their eagerness to join the picket line, with their socialist placards and their air of injury, is as ridiculous as it is offensive.

But as the BMA has discovered through the turmoil in its own offices, manufactured grievances can be infectious. That lesson can be found throughout the public sector, where weak management is often matched by a neurotic emphasis on workplace rights. Just 13% of private employees are union members, compared to more than half on the state payroll.

That helps to explain why there is proportionally more industrial unrest in the public services. The doctors’ dispute is just part of a pattern of rising militancy across the State, the embittered mood fuelled by emotive propaganda claiming the public sector has been singled out for punishment through cruel austerity policies. This narrative is completely false.

Public spending is at a record level, while yesterday it was revealed that pay in the state sector has gone up by 8.7% over the last year, far exceeding wage inflation in the private sector. Yet still the unions peddle their tale of misery and martyrdom.

“We public sector workers are in the front line for chronic underfunding, low pay and outsourcing. We have borne the brunt of it all,” wails Andrea Egan, who became this week the new General Secretary of Unison, Egan is one of a band of left-wing union chiefs who want to promote a more radical agenda.

Others include Eddie Dempsy, the head of the RMT transport union who yesterday warned of imminent strikes at the newly nationalised rail company, and Sharon Graham, leader of Unite, who was elected to her post in 2021 as the self-styled “workers candidate”.

An equally significant figure is Daniel Kebede, General Secretary of the National Education Union, who has denounced the British state as “fundamentally and institutionally racist”. The Labour Government should stand up to the picket-line poseurs, the affluent agitators and marching militants.

If the Cabinet had the political will, there are plenty of steps it could take to reduce the unions’ capacity for bullying, such as the introduction of tighter rules on strike ballots and an end to the unions’ privileged immunity from claims for damages.

Just as sensible was the proposal made by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch yesterday that emergency workers should be banned from taking industrial action.

Inhibited by sentimentality and the unions’ role as key Labour paymasters, ministers will do none of that. Instead there will further retreat, as epitomised by the Employment Bill, which will considerably enhance unions power. “We will strengthen the role of the trade unions in our society,” said Angela Rayner, the former Deputy Leader when she introduced the legislation in 2023.

The comrades may have cheered her, but to the public that sounded like a threat.