Resident doctors begin longest strike yet as Streeting accuses BMA of hypocrisy over pay – UK politics live
Wes Streeting says strikes by resident doctors have cost country £3bn over past 3 years as fresh walkout starts
Good morning. Resident doctors in English hospitals started a six-day strike at 7am this morning. Many of them will continue to work, but there will be enough of them joining the strike to have a significant impact on the care hospitals can deliver. It is the 15th resident doctors (who used to be known as junior doctors) have been on stage since they launched a campaign in 2023 to get their pay back to the equivalent level it used to be before austerity kicked in after the financial crash.
This morning Wes Streeting, the health secretary, deployed a new statistic in his PR battle against the BMA, the doctors’ union organised the strikes. He confirmed a figure highlighted in the Daily Mail’s splash saying strikes by resident doctors have now cost the country £3bn.
In an interview with the Today programme, asked if that was an official government figure, Streeting replied:
We think that strikes cost £50m a day. And so that is, an accurate reflection of the cost of these strikes.
But, when it was put to him the BMA is saying that £3bn is about what it would have cost to give the resident doctors the pay rise they are demaning, Streeting would not accept this. He replied:
What is true is that in order to deliver a full pay restoration back to 2008 levels, using the RPI account of inflation, it would cost in the order of £3bn a year.
Let’s then assume that other NHS staff would understandably demand the same. Then that cost would be more like £30bn a year. That is more than the entire cost of the Ministry of Justice’s entire budget for running the criminal justice system.
Now, this goes to the heart of the intransigence of the BMA. Despite being the biggest winner by a country mile of public sector pay increases – since this government came in, 28.9% is what they got from us – within weeks of taking office, they still went out on strike.
Andrew Gregory and Peter Walker have more from what Streeting has been saying about the strike here.
I will post more from Streeting’s broadcast interviews this morning shortly.
Here is the agenda for the day.
7am: Resident doctors started a six-day strike in England. (Rather, some of them did – in the past, many doctors have chosen to work rather than to join the BMA strike.)
9.15am: John Swinney, SNP leader and Scottish first minister, holds a campaign event focused on fuel prices. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, is holding a campaign event focused on pothole policy (at 9.30am), and Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative leader, is launching his manifesto (at 2pm).
Morning: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is campaigning in Newcastle.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
12.30pm: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding a press conference in Warwickshire.
Afternoon: Military planners from around 35 countries interested in plans to keep the strait of Hormuz open after the Iran war ends meet to discuss options at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, north-west London.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Dfe caps student loan interest rates at 6% to protect students and graduates from impact of potential Iran war inflation spike
The Department for Education has announced that that it will cap the interest paid on plan 2 and plan 3 student loans at 6% for the 2026/27 academic years. This will protect students and graduates from England and Wales with these loans from a potential inflation spike caused by the Iran war.
In a news release, the DfE says:
Graduates will not pay the price for a war which the UK has no direct involvement in.
This reform removes the risk of any temporary increase in inflation causing loan balances to compound at an unsustainable rate and is in line with actions taken in the past to secure stability in the student finance system.
Graduates with Plan 2 loans currently pay interest rates of between RPI and RPI plus 3%, depending on their earnings. Current students on Plan 2 and Plan 3 also attract an interest rate of RPI +3% while they are studying.
Interest on Plan 2 and 3 student loans will be capped at 6% instead of RPI+3% to protect borrowers. This will ensure no Plan 2 or Plan 3 borrower faces an interest rate of above 6%, protecting them from any short-term increase in RPI due to global shocks, such as temporary spikes in oil prices, outside the government’s control. The government is clear this is not our war and the UK will not be dragged into conflict, but the impacts will affect the future of our country.
There is further coverage here.
There are five types of student loan repayment plan in operation in the UK, and they vary depending on where in the UK people are from, when they started studing, and what sort of degree they were or are doing. There is a good guide to all five plans here.
Streeting says inviting Kanye West to perform at Wireless was ‘very bad error of judgment’
In his interviews this morning, Wes Streeting also joined those criticising Wireless festival for its decision to invite Kanye West to peform.
Streeting told the Today programme that, given West’s history of antisemitic and pro-Hitler comments, the decision was inexplicable.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Wireless still have him as a headliner.
There are plenty of other talented artists in this country, let alone internationally, who would benefit from the exposure and who in turn would help drive ticket sales.
To provide this kind of platform and opportunity to Kanye West against this backdrop of behaviour I think is a very bad error of judgment.
Streeting also said that for West to blame what he had done on his mental health was also appalling.
When Kanye West uses bipolar disorder to justify his actions, I think that is equally appalling, by the way.
I would ask people to consider, does using bipolar disorder as an excuse to write and release a song called Heil Hitler and plaster it across T-shirts, does bipolar disorder really justify that? Or is it an excuse to justify rotten behaviour?
Streeting says resident doctors’ strike will leave some patients in pain for ‘longer than is necessary’
Here are some more lines from Wes Streeting’s interviews this morning about the resident doctors’ strike.
We don’t want strike action to put people off from coming forward if they need medical attention if they need it – emergency services are running. We’ve managed to maintain we think about 95% of planned care due to take place today, so things like tests and scans, surgeries, procedures.
But I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t consequences to this disruption, if you’re someone who’s waited for your test or scan or your operation, chances are you’ve been waiting a lot longer than I would like you to, and so psyching yourself up for that moment and then getting the cancellation can be both bitterly disappointing, and in some cases, will leave people waiting in pain or anxiety longer than is necessary.
I have never closed the door to the BMA and their representatives.
In fact, last Friday, Good Friday morning, I met with the resident doctors committee officers and asked them directly: ‘What would it take to end these strikes? You’ve rejected the offer we’ve put to you, what is your counter proposal?’ And they didn’t have one.
Resident doctors are, by a country mile, the standout winners of the entire public sector workforce when it comes to the pay rises they have received from this Government, and this was a good deal, they have rejected it.
The day they rejected it, they rushed straight to six days of strike action, which will cost the NHS £300m.
And in that context of the whopping pay rise they received when we came in and the generous deal that they have rejected. I’ll leave your viewers to decide who in this dispute has been most unreasonable.
There aren’t fewer jobs as a result of this, because what we were doing is converting locally employed doctor posts into training places.
The reason why resident doctors will be disappointed, and many of them are, is because those training places come with more pay and career progression opportunities for those doctors.
I have not had NHS leaders banging on my door demanding more of these places, the reason why we negotiated these training places is because I recognised there were bottlenecks affecting resident doctors.
I haven’t taken those places away. The BMA rejected them.
Labour dismisses Reform UK’s slavery reparations announcement as ‘desperate gimmick’
The Labour party has described Reform UK’s reparations announcement (see 9.56am) as “a desperate gimmick”. A Labour spokesperson said:
This is a desperate gimmick from Reform that would do nothing to restore order and control to Britain’s borders.
That’s this Labour government’s focus and that’s why we are taking decisive action to tackle surges in asylum claims by imposing an emergency brake on study and work visas from countries abusing the system, slashing £1bn from the asylum support bill, and halving the length of refugee protection to 30 months.
Nobody will take Nigel Farage seriously on this when his party is full of opportunistic Tories who failed on immigration when they were in government.
Reform UK would stop visas for people from countries seeking slavery reparations
Eric Williams, who wrote a landmark history of the slave trade and who subsequently became the first prime minister of Trindad and Tobago after indepndence, once famously wrote:
British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery merely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.
He died in 1981 but he might have been gratified to learn that, more than 40 years on, his insight remains as valid as ever – at least judging by what Reform UK is up to today.
Slavery reparations are not a pressing issue in UK politics; given that none of the mainstream parties as ever proposed paying reparations, they should not even make the top 100 as a matter of pressing political dispute. But they are powerful ammunition for the right in the culture wars, and fail-safe clickbait, and today Reform UK is announcing that, if it were in government, it would refuse to issue visa to countries demaning reparations from the UK. Jamie Grierson has the details.
While the mainstream parties do not back reparations, the Green party is in favour. After the UN general assembly passed a resolution last month condemning slavery as a crime against humanity, the Green party issued a statement saying:
Many Green party activists have over the years been working hard towards establishing Reparative Justice in the UK and this United Nations motion will go a long way in supporting the global reparations movement.
It is not just problematic, but deeply sad that the countries most involved in the trans-Atlantic trafficking of African people were the countries to either vote against, or abstain from the motion, giving underhanded, loophole excuses to fight against accountability.
Streeting accuses BMA of hypocrisy, saying it’s giving its staff pay rise well below what resident doctors offered
In his interviews this morning Wes Streeting, the health secretary, accused the BMA of hypocrisy over pay because the organisation is offering its own staff far less than the resident doctors are demanding.
He told BBC Breakfast:
And here’s the real kicker; having rejected this deal because the pay offer apparently wasn’t good enough at 4.9%, the BMA are offering their own staff 2.75% on affordability grounds.
Why does the BMA think they can get away with telling their own staff they only get 2.75% because that’s all they can afford, whilst rejecting a 4.9% offer because that’s all the government can afford.
It seems to me, the BMA aren’t willing to put their hands in their own pockets to pay their own staff, but they’re very happy to try and fleece your viewers, asking them to pay even more in tax than I think this country can afford.
He made the same point in an interview on Today, explaining what the BMA was doing and adding: “There’s a word for that.”
In a separate interview on the Today programme, Jack Fletcher, chair of its resident doctors committee, said that he was not responsible for what the BMA paid its staff and that he supported their right to go on strike.
Wes Streeting says strikes by resident doctors have cost country £3bn over past 3 years as fresh walkout starts
Good morning. Resident doctors in English hospitals started a six-day strike at 7am this morning. Many of them will continue to work, but there will be enough of them joining the strike to have a significant impact on the care hospitals can deliver. It is the 15th resident doctors (who used to be known as junior doctors) have been on stage since they launched a campaign in 2023 to get their pay back to the equivalent level it used to be before austerity kicked in after the financial crash.
This morning Wes Streeting, the health secretary, deployed a new statistic in his PR battle against the BMA, the doctors’ union organised the strikes. He confirmed a figure highlighted in the Daily Mail’s splash saying strikes by resident doctors have now cost the country £3bn.
In an interview with the Today programme, asked if that was an official government figure, Streeting replied:
We think that strikes cost £50m a day. And so that is, an accurate reflection of the cost of these strikes.
But, when it was put to him the BMA is saying that £3bn is about what it would have cost to give the resident doctors the pay rise they are demaning, Streeting would not accept this. He replied:
What is true is that in order to deliver a full pay restoration back to 2008 levels, using the RPI account of inflation, it would cost in the order of £3bn a year.
Let’s then assume that other NHS staff would understandably demand the same. Then that cost would be more like £30bn a year. That is more than the entire cost of the Ministry of Justice’s entire budget for running the criminal justice system.
Now, this goes to the heart of the intransigence of the BMA. Despite being the biggest winner by a country mile of public sector pay increases – since this government came in, 28.9% is what they got from us – within weeks of taking office, they still went out on strike.
Andrew Gregory and Peter Walker have more from what Streeting has been saying about the strike here.
I will post more from Streeting’s broadcast interviews this morning shortly.
Here is the agenda for the day.
7am: Resident doctors started a six-day strike in England. (Rather, some of them did – in the past, many doctors have chosen to work rather than to join the BMA strike.)
9.15am: John Swinney, SNP leader and Scottish first minister, holds a campaign event focused on fuel prices. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, is holding a campaign event focused on pothole policy (at 9.30am), and Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative leader, is launching his manifesto (at 2pm).
Morning: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is campaigning in Newcastle.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
12.30pm: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding a press conference in Warwickshire.
Afternoon: Military planners from around 35 countries interested in plans to keep the strait of Hormuz open after the Iran war ends meet to discuss options at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, north-west London.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.