The leader of NHS junior doctors in England has urged Jeremy Hunt to stop treating them like “the enemy” and instead reopen negotiations in a bid to stop their threatened strike.
The chair of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee, Dr Johann Malawana, told the health secretary he must stop lambasting junior doctors if he wants to settle a long-running dispute over his threat to introduce new NHS contracts.
“Stop attacking us. We are not the enemy. We are just health professionals who want to have a meaningful discussion. Talk to us, talk to us reasonably. Stop going to the press claiming that we are scaremongering”, said Malawana as he addressed a protest rally in central London attended by many thousands of junior doctors, their families and other health service personnel.
Talking to the Observer, Dr Malawana said junior doctors were still preparing to ballot for industrial action because they were so frustrated with Hunt’s handling of the dispute.
He said: “We feel that we are backed into a corner by the course of action that Jeremy Hunt has engaged in, which is effectively to say that he’s going to impose this contract and we have to agree with it. So we have no other way of stopping it, or expressing what our members feel, apart from balloting for industrial action.”
The BMA will reveal details of the ballot this week in an attempt to put further pressure on Hunt to compromise. The union is refusing to re-enter negotiations unless Hunt drops his threat to impose a new contract, which he has refused to do.
Any junior doctor – any doctor below the level of consultant – who is a member of the BMA by 23 October will be eligible to take part in the ballot, which is likely to produce an overwhelming mandate for action.
Malawana and a succession of other doctors issued pointed rebukes to Hunt’s assertion in interviews on Saturday that the doctors’ union had provoked the dispute by misrepresenting the government’s offer to England’s 45,000 trainee doctors.
The health secretary said hours before the protest was due to start that the British Medical Association (BMA) had misled doctors over the proposed reforms.
Malawana argued in turn that doctors had made up their own minds and decided the new contract would cut their pay by up to 30% and force them to work even more antisocial shifts.
Malawana claimed that Hunt had angered junior doctors across England with his threat and baseless rhetoric. He spoke to a crowd containing thousands of doctors in their green or blue scrubs, or wearing their trademark white coats, while many hung stethoscopes around their necks.
At the rally a male doctor, still wearing his NHS-issue light blue hairnet for surgical staff, had turned a cardboard delivery box into a placard. On one side it said “Tired doctors make mistakes” and on the other “New contract – DNR.”
The mood at the rally, just off Pall Mall, was defiant, boisterous and determined, though interspersed with noisy chants of “Hunt must go, Hunt must go” and “BMA, BMA, BMA”, in support of the organisation Hunt is trying to separate them from. A police helicopter hovered noisily in the air above, but the event was very good-natured, though tinged with obvious and recurring anger.
Placards showed some had come from many parts of England – including Portsmouth, Birmingham and Sheffield – as well as Scotland, where the Holyrood government has decided to take a different tack to Hunt and not impose a new contract.
Harry Leslie Smith, 92-year-old author, activist and NHS campaigner, had doctors in tears at the end of his speech. He told the crowd that the NHS is “Britain’s greatest achievement” because it has freed millions from sickness. It must not be handed over to corporations, he said.
Applause greeted the display on a screen behind the speakers of a tweet in support of junior doctors by JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, as did an interview with the actor Martin Freeman, who also voiced his support.
Among a sea of placards, one – beside an Australian flag – said “Don’t make us go to a land down under”, a reference to the widespread fear voiced by both junior doctors and the profession’s medical royal colleges that if Hunt pushes ahead with his threat, many young doctors will quit the NHS to work abroad.
Another placard said: “Six years at medical school. £30,000 in student loans. Worked two in three weekends in A&E. (I already work seven days a week). Three Christmases without my family (but I had some orange juice on the surgical unit). I don’t leave on time – patient care comes first.”