TThe junior doctors were due to strike again, and everyone was sick of the whole business. At the last minute, after a new government offer, the walkout has been called off. This is a relief, even if it isn’t yet a resolution. The vast majority of junior doctors I work with have become as fed up with the dispute as the rest of us. As the strikes have progressed, an ever-increasing number have turned up to work despite being members of the BMA. But even if this dispute now ends, new legislation means similar ones may soon return with dreary frequency in other trades and professions.
Junior doctors feel underpaid, and we ought to manage some sympathy for that, if only on the grounds that few of us feel we’re overpaid. Then there’s the fact that young people – and we were young once – are never slow to feel hard done by. Today’s property prices mean they really are. Ensure that too few homes are built for a growing population and grudges are a natural result.
Junior doctors are genuinely outraged by the travesty of their jobs having been given to overseas medics and by the slow and half-hearted way in which that needless problem has been fixed. For all these grudges, however, the strikes have long been doomed.
