Resident doctors are on strike again for b days. Yes, it's near Christmas and yes, it's in the middle of a flu epidemic. But no, it is not "dangerous and irresponsible" as Starmer claimed in PMQs this week - when he more or less agreed with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch's violent denunciation of the strikers.

    She - unsurprisingly - added that strikes by doctors should be banned! But so far, Starmer hasn't gone thatfar. Of course there's no guarantee that he won't in the future, given his record in bowing to Tory/Reform pressure!

    On the other hand, his health minister, Wes Streeting, has been on strike himself ever since he arrived in government. Indeed, when it comes to paying doctors what they need and deserve, cutting their hours and employing more doctors and trainees he's just sat on his hands!

    Yet the doctors are absolutely exhausted. They hardly ever get proper breaks. They can work up to 72 hours at a stretch. And the bottom line is that there just aren't enough of them.

    And the reason for this is simple. To cut NHS costs, NHS bosses and Streeting avoid employing staff and so tens of thousands of job vacancies remain right across the NHS. They could have taken on new workers, but didn't. And it's a dangerous choice.

What an empty Streeting!

What's more, so-called resident doctors are working for years and years on the lowest pay level (~ £38,000 pa) - less even, than a physician's assistant, who doesn't have a full medical degree. And they're denied specialist training. This is again, Streeting's choice. Specialists cost too much. So there's a shortage today of 20,000 such posts. And in the meantime these doctors are doing this "specialist" work anyway, since there's no-one else to do it - but at a cut rate. It's specialist health care on the cheap!

    Streeting - while calling doctors greedy and villainous - has "offered" just 4,000 more training posts to add to a total of 10,000, when applications for these posts stand at 30,000!

    As for the "greedy" insult - well by now most people should know that a resident doctor's average annual pay of £38,000 is 25% less than an average Ford car worker and just over half of what a train driver gets paid. No wonder there's a retention problem in the NHS.

    So yes, the realities of this strike are distorted and lied about. Including the real situation on the ground - where there's always emergency cover in place during the strike, provided by the strikers themselves, and by consultants who take their place.

    And by the way, Streeting's boast that he has done so much for the NHS so far - like cut waiting lists - this is less than a drop in the ocean. A cut of 200,000 out of the 7 million still waiting!

100 years later, a 2nd general strike?

However the real problem of this doctors's strike, from the working class point of view, is that they're striking all on their own. As if all health and social care workers, not to mention today's overloaded teachers, aren't in the same boat - and some are in an even worse one. In fact when it comes to pay, social care workers and teachers' assistants barely scrape by.

    And it's not just in the public sector where there's a problem. Subcontracting and agency working is the mainstay of manufacturing - especially in the car plants. And with this comes a degradation of conditions and pay cuts all the way down to the minimum wage.

    The point being, that across the whole of the working class there would be a common interest in fighting the bosses for decent wages and conditions. Yes, and if there was a real trade union movement which gave a damn about our class and had any guts at all, then all other sections of workers would be standing up for the doctors and the whole of the NHS workforce today...

    The fact that each section of workers is left to fight alone is, of course nothing new; it has almost always been so. One would have to go back to the 1950s to find an example of what we mean - when the dockers went on strike for the then non-unionised nurses!

    But as a result, there have always been defeats, too. And itis (very) high time this changed! Yes 100 years after the last, but defeated, British General Strike of May 1926!

    Today this may involve breaking the law. But that's the only way real change happens. And it will mean taking control out of the hands of all official union leaderships, be it Unite, the British Medical Association, the RMT, or any other. Because to leave it to them is to lose the battle. Their job is not to win, but to make a deal and keep us in sectional order!

    Struggles which unite us across all sectors would mean opening a new chapter in working class history. For once there could be true democratic control by strikers themselves. And the chance to win... but not only that, the chance to change everything!