TUESDAY brought yet more grim news for the public finances.
The Office For National Statistics revealed that in June, the Government was forced to borrow £20.7billion.
GettyDoctors’ strikes are set to go ahead after last-minute talks collapsed[/caption]
PABMA resident doctors’ leaders Nieuwoudt and Melissa Ryan met Health Secretary Wes Streeting[/caption]
That was £6.6billion higher than last June — and all this in spite of the £40billion of tax rises announced in last October’s Budget.
The Government is drowning in debt.
Paying interest on its accumulated debts is costing the taxpayer £100billion a year — almost double what we spend on defence. There is little hope of improvement.
Economic growth is virtually non-existent, productivity is flat-lining and tax rises are failing to raise as much revenue as the Chancellor hoped, as taxpayers choose to work less hard, rearrange their tax affairs or, in some cases, emigrate.
But there is one place where you can be sure the news will not have sunk in: the offices of Britain’s public sector unions.
Lining pockets
In fact, the BMA — which is rapidly inheriting the mantle of the country’s most militant trade union from the Rail, Maritime And Transport union — chose the moment to request that its consultant members charge the NHS at least £188 an hour to provide cover during the junior doctors’ five-day strike, which begins tomorrow, rising to £313 an hour for weekend work.
It could mean some consultants lining their pockets with up to £6,000 this weekend.
It isn’t hard to see the BMA’s logic: it wants to try to break the NHS’s finances to force the Government to give in.
In spite of the extravagant bills demanded by consultants, the NHS will still not be providing a normal service during the latest walkout.
During the last set of strikes by junior doctors — who now demand to be called “resident doctors” to disguise the fact they are still in training — more than a million treatments ended up being cancelled.
It’s been reported that coroners’ findings mentioned the strikes in five deaths, but that is almost certainly a gross under-estimate.
During the week of one 72-hour strike in March 2023, the ONS recorded 2,247 “excess deaths” — the number of deaths above what might have been expected from the average of the previous five years over that period.
Deep down, the BMA’s hard men seem to realise the harm that they are causing.
Dr Ross Nieuwoudt, the co-chair of the BMA’s Resident Doctors’ Committee, told Times Radio yesterday that consultants who refused to cancel their normal clinics in order to man A&E departments would be guilty of a “dereliction of duty”.
Yet strangely, he did not seem to want to apply the same term to junior doctors who walk out on strike.
We all appreciate what doctors do, of course — yet even miners’ leader Arthur Scargill at the height of his pomp was not as unreasonable as the BMA is being.
Times Newspapers LtdMiners’ leader Arthur Scargill at the height of his pomp was not as unreasonable as the BMA[/caption]
Junior doctors received a 22 per cent pay increase last year and have already been offered an inflation-busting 5.4 per cent this year. Their claim that they need a 29 per cent increase this year to return their pay in real terms to 2008 levels is fallacious.
They made that calculation using the Retail Prices Index, a long-discredited measure which has been criticised for exaggerating inflation.
Some junior doctors can now earn £100,000 a year, including overtime. What’s more, they have a generous pension scheme which involves the taxpayer contributing an extra 20.68 per cent of their pay to their pension pot.
When they retire, their pensions will be linked to their lifetime earnings and will be inflation-proofed.
Such deals are virtually unknown now in the private sector, where employers make average pension contributions equivalent to just 4.5 per cent of an employee’s pay — and where in most cases pension payouts are dependent on the performance of underlying investments.
And it is not just the BMA which has lost its grasp of fiscal reality.
Public sector unions are living in a parallel, dream universe where there is an infinite pot of money to meet their demands.
On their side of the looking glass, workers have a fundamental right to above-inflation pay rises year on year without ever having to improve their productivity.
Bankrolled by unions
On the contrary, many seem to think they could still enjoy inflation-busting rises if their working week was reduced from five days a week to four.
Sorry, but it doesn’t work.
Societies grow richer by being more productive.
And that is something which seems to have eluded Britain’s public sector for the past three decades.
PAStarmer’s administration has shown itself so far to be a pushover[/caption]
Astonishingly, according to ONS figures, the average worker in the public sector now produces less than they did when Tony Blair took office 28 years ago.
That is an unparalleled era of non-achievement.
The unions seem to be counting on the current Government being equally blind to the dire state of the public finances.
Starmer’s administration has shown itself so far to be a pushover — which is hardly surprising when you consider that the Labour Party is bankrolled by the unions.
But no government will be able to ignore for much longer Britain’s reckoning with its debts.
What happened under Liz Truss was just a foretaste of what is to come if global bond investors lose confidence in the UK Government’s ability to repay its dues.
When that happens, Britain will be in the situation Greece was 14 years ago when public salaries and pensions had to be slashed to avoid national bankruptcy.
Public sector unions will wail all they like, but they would have helped bring the disaster on themselves.
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