The junior doctors’ strike shows the BMA has become a barrier to progress

While the precise toll of the junior doctors’ strike is unclear, there can be little doubt that it will have a grim impact on the health of the nation, not least with higher waiting lists. Callously, it has been timed to follow the Easter weekend, when many more senior doctors – who would normally fill in for striking juniors – are away with their families in the school holidays. The result is that the safety net during this strike is more patchy and frayed, meaning some patients, tragically, may fall through it.

One person who has not been present to see the havoc the strikes have caused in hospitals, however, is Dr Robert Laurenson, co-chair of the British Medical Association’s (BMA) junior doctor committee, which has played a key role in promoting the industrial action in pursuit of an astonishing 35 per cent pay demand – a hike to make even the militant unions of the 1970s blush. He is taking a pre-arranged holiday. Nothing could make clearer the BMA’s attitude towards dialogue than the fact that one of the strike’s key agitators is away at the very moment when talks are most needed. Such insouciance speaks to the suspicion that the union’s leaders are playing politics with people’s lives.

If the BMA is so eager to improve the salaries of its hard-working members, it should support a clearer link between performance and pay. It is the apparent rigidity of NHS pay scales that is truly unjust, seemingly encouraging some of its most talented employees to leave the health service. But that would mean championing individual aspiration, softening its militant attitude and relinquishing its grip over the massed picket line. In truth, the BMA has become a barrier to progress.