Where the newspapers stand on the junior doctors' strike
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Version 0 of 1. Who governs? The Daily Telegraph reminded its readers that the question was put to the nation in 1974 by the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath when faced by trades union militancy. His administration was being defied 42 years ago by the miners’ union. This time around, David Cameron’s government is confronted by junior doctors in England represented by the British Medical Association. Now the central question to ask of national newspapers is where they stand: which of them supports the doctors and which supports the government in the shape of health secretary Jeremy Hunt? The Daily Mirror’s front page left no-one in any doubt about its answer. “Stop running, start talking”, said its headline over a picture of “cowardly Hunt” as he “dodges” protests while facing “new calls to negotiate”. And the Labour-supporting paper backed that up in its editorial, calling Hunt hapless and arrogant. “Dennis Skinner spoke for the nation,” it said, when he told Hunt “to wipe the smirk off his face”. The Mirror’s newly minted stablemate, The New Day, reveals its sympathies with a front page, “Half of junior doctors say: ‘we will leave the NHS’”, and an inside spread with two columns attacking Hunt’s position. Unsurprisingly, the Morning Star backed the union: “Hunt ‘wants his miners’ strike moment’ against doctors”. But it was possible to view the neutral Metro’s headline, “Junior doctors: it’s all-out war”, as supportive of the union too. The Independent was not, however, moved to side with the striking doctors, decrying both their “failure to compromise” and the government’s “stubborn intransigence”. It accused Hunt and Cameron of being engineering a “showdown to keep alive their wider goal of increasing NHS services across seven days a week on an already stretched budget”. But it thought “some in the doctors union... have been equally keen to take on the Tory government, rather than engaging more constructively to improve the lot of their membership”. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee pointed out that the government “fatally damaged its case with a flat refusal to consider a sensible cross-party compromise, supported even by the Daily Mail and Sunday Times, to set up pilot schemes to test if the contract does reduce weekend death rates”. She also suspected that Hunt and Cameron were treating the doctors as if they were miners in order to secure a victory against all public sector workers. She continued: “Senior NHS managers regard Hunt as a dead man walking, who will be gone in the post-referendum reshuffle. But Cameron is as much to blame for this calamity, so will the next minister sent in continue this pointless confrontation? What the NHS needs is someone to navigate gently through these multiple crises, stop provoking staff and be willing to arm-wrestle new money out of the treasury. God forbid the NHS will be inflicted with another eager politician hoping to make their name with yet another Big New NHS Idea.” But the government’s position was bolstered by supportive leading articles in the Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Sun, plus an op-ed piece in the Daily Express. The Times argued that the doctors were “squandering” the public’s trust. The are paid well, it said, and “it is not reasonable” for them “to hold the health service to ransom”. It referred to the BMA as “an ideologically driven union” which refused to resolve is differences with Hunt “through good-faith negotiation” and chose to move the goalposts. It continued: “A seven-day NHS is an important goal. It is the least that taxpayers can expect in return for the £2.2bn that the health service consumes each week. This will require more consultants and diagnostic services as well as junior doctors to be available at weekends. Politically, it will require the government to stand firm against a radicalised doctors’ union that fosters a culture of complaint when patients need a culture of co-operation.” The Telegraph, while accepting that “the views of employees matter”, it is politicians who are accountable to voters. The government was “elected with a clear majority on a manifesto commitment to move the NHS to a full seven-day service”. Politicians, said the paper, “should decide how public services are run, then answer for their decisions... It is not the job of doctors to dictate health policy; their job is to treat patients”. The Mail thought the doctors were “testing public sympathy to breaking point” with an unprecedented strike at the behest of “the left-wing-dominated British Medical Association”. It urged Hunt to stand firm: “To yield to the BMA activists, as they incite their members to ever more dangerous forms of protest, would be a betrayal not just of the cause of public-sector reform, but of the NHS itself”. The Sun, which called the strike “shameful” believed that “naive young professionals” were being led “by hard-left union agitators”. It pointed to the anti-strike argument in an accompanying article by a junior doctor, Adam Dalby, which had been carried the previous day by the Telegraph He wrote: “It is not acceptable for a trade union to attempt to destabilise a democratically elected government which has a mandate to do what it is doing.” And an op-ed article in the Express by Ross Clark took a similar line. He also compared the hospital walk-out to the 1984 miners’ strike: “Dr Mark Porter may not have the same firebrand persona of Arthur Scargill but his union the British Medical Association (BMA) has gone the way of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)”. Clark argued that “it would be tempting to think that the BMA is more professional than the likes of the NUM... Sadly, if anything, it is worse. It has consistently tried to mislead its own members as well as the public over the effects of the government’s planned reform of NHS pay structures.” On Monday, the Financial Times contended that although Hunt had “not handled the dispute well” and should have shown “more tact and diplomacy”, the BMA had overplayed its hand. The union had made few, if any, concessions, said the FT. “It appears increasingly driven by a desire to damage the government rather than to seek a reasonable settlement... “If the BMA wants its members to be better paid, it should be making a broader argument about the need for increased public funding of the heath service”. |