New doctors’ strike is a test case for how Labour governs
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The British Medical Association has announced a five-day strike by resident doctors (formerly junior doctors) from November 14-19.
It will be the 13th strike since March 2023 in a pay and conditions dispute that began under the Conservatives but continues under Labour.
The BMA says real-terms pay for these doctors is still 20 per cent lower than in 2008, even after nearly 30 per cent in cumulative rises over the last three years.
The union’s statement also highlights a jobs crisis, where there are 30,000 applicants for only 10,000 training places after residency, forcing thousands of UK-trained doctors either abroad or out of medicine entirely.
The Labour government, through Health Secretary Wes Streeting, insists it has already been generous and will not return to pay negotiations.
Instead, it is offering to expand training places and support doctors with exam fees and career development. Streeting says further concessions are unaffordable while the NHS absorbs the cost of previous strikes.
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Here‘s the BBC:
The government will not “be held to ransom” by striking doctors, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said.
Streeting told the BBC there was a deal available to increase the number of speciality training places and provide support for things like exam fees.
But he said: “I can’t do that if I’m spending a quarter-of-a-billion pounds meeting the costs of strikes.”
But the BMA said the government had not presented “any proposals to us which will see the real change needed to fix the jobs crisis this year”.
It added that it had requested “as little as £1 per hour more over the next few years” in terms of a pay deal for resident doctors.
“Mr Streeting should be honest with patients: we are losing doctors to other countries and professions because they can’t find work in the UK – despite training here and wanting to work here,” the statement added.
What makes this strike different
This is the first strike under a Labour government — and specifically under a party that traditionally draws union support.
That alone makes the political dynamics unusual.
The BMA expected more sympathy and constructive negotiation from Labour, and the government’s refusal to re-open pay talks represents a deliberate break from that assumption.
Streeting is reframing the narrative: Unlike the Conservatives, who often portrayed striking doctors as greedy or disruptive, Streeting is arguing a resource-allocation case.
He says he’s sympathetic but constrained — that every pound spent on strikes is a pound not spent on training or patients.
This recasts the argument as one of “shared responsibility” rather than confrontation, while still using Thatcherite language like “we will not be held to ransom.”
A change in the name and status of “junior doctors”: The term resident doctors is new and intended to sound more professional and permanent.
The BMA hoped this would signal a step up in recognition and responsibility.
Instead, the government has used it to draw a line — implying these doctors have already been substantially rewarded and should now “move on.”
The underlying crisis is not just pay but workforce planning. Earlier strikes focused narrowly on pay restoration but this one is more complex, tying together pay, training, and career progression — particularly the lack of posts after the second training year.
That makes it a dispute not only about fairness but about retention, NHS capacity, and the sustainability of the medical workforce.
Streeting’s Labour is trying to prove its fiscal discipline to the markets and the media. The Health Secretary’s insistence that “we can’t afford another quarter-of-a-billion” fits the wider Starmer–Reeves narrative of “no unfunded spending promises”.
The subtext is that Labour’s credibility with the City takes precedence over its relationship with the unions — something that differentiates this strike from those under the Tories, who used strikes to rally their own base rather than reassure financial institutions.
What makes the government’s stance different from the Tories’
Streeting couches his position in managerial, technocratic language rather than moral outrage. But his phrase “we will not be held to ransom” echoes Tory rhetoric from the Cameron–Hunt and Sunak–Barclay eras.
The difference is that Labour’s argument is not ideological (“militant doctors versus hardworking taxpayers”) but fiscal and strategic (“every strike costs us investment in the NHS”).
But while Tory governments could present confrontation with unions as expected, Labour faces an internal contradiction: the party is supposed to represent working people — yet it is now telling public-sector professionals that they’ve had enough.
The political cost could be severe if Streeting alienates medical staff and voters who expected better from Labour.
While Tories generally blamed staff strikes for worsening waiting lists, Streeting adds a note of reluctant realism — acknowledging both industrial action and rising demand.
This allows him to appear “honest” while still avoiding the root problem: chronic underfunding and workforce shortages.
Finally, by refusing to re-open pay talks, Labour signals to the financial press that it won’t bow to “special pleading” from public sector groups.
That’s a posture designed to contrast with past Labour governments and reassure business — not the public or the workforce.
The deeper issue
This is not just another pay dispute — it’s a test case for how Labour governs:
Can it manage industrial relations with empathy and credibility, or will it treat doctors the same way the Conservatives treated nurses and rail workers?
If the answer is the latter, it suggests Starmer’s Labour sees maintaining economic orthodoxy as more important than rebuilding trust in public services.
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Why is Labour’s oldest thinktank now supporting this Tory stealth tax?
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The Fabians are Labour’s oldest think tank, founded to provide the intellectual underpinnings for gradual socialist reform.
But over the years, they have become much more technocratic and aligned with Labour’s leadership line — especially under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
This story, from The Guardian, indicates that the organisation has fallen a long way:
The influential Labour thinktank the Fabian Society is urging Rachel Reeves to raise £12bn in next month’s budget by extending the freeze on income tax thresholds for another two years.
Joe Dromey, the Fabians’ general secretary, argues in a new report that the move is the “best available option” for the chancellor as she seeks to offset the impact of weaker economic forecasts in her 26 November statement.
Dromey describes extending the threshold freeze as “an effective and progressive way to raise over half the funding that she needs, with most coming from wealthier households, and with relatively little political risk”.
Starting in 2022 as the UK recovered from the costs of the Covid pandemic, Rishi Sunak froze the thresholds at which workers move into a higher income tax band instead of increasing them each year in line with inflation.
Jeremy Hunt as chancellor extended that pause but it is set to end in 2027/28. Over that time, the OBR estimates that the freeze will have brought in an additional £45bn a year.
Dromey, the general secretary quoted in the piece, is a centrist policy operator — formerly at the Resolution Foundation and previously a Labour parliamentary candidate. His framing of the tax freeze as “progressive” depends entirely on modelling assumptions that wealthier households bear more of the cost in cash terms.
That may be true numerically, but it obscures the distributional effect — which hits earners whose wages rise only just in line with inflation much harder than those whose income comes from property, capital, or top-level salaries.
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What the tax threshold freeze actually does
“Fiscal drag” — freezing thresholds instead of uprating them with inflation — raises billions without changing the nominal tax rate. But it does so by stealth: people pay more tax just for keeping up with prices, not because they’re any better off.
This erodes living standards and suppresses disposable income among precisely the people Labour claims to champion — lower- and middle-income earners.
It’s a deeply regressive mechanism in real terms, even if it looks “progressive” on paper due to the headline revenue shares.
In practice, this is Sunak and Hunt’s austerity-by-stealth strategy — and it is extraordinary that the Fabian Society now appears to be endorsing and extending it.
Why they are advocating it
There are a few likely motives:
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Political caution: Reeves has boxed herself in with her “fiscal rules” and pledge not to raise income tax rates. The Fabians are trying to find ways to raise money without breaking those pledges.
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Perception management: Calling a stealth tax “progressive” allows Labour to argue they’re being responsible while not frightening the wealthy donor class or the City.
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Technocratic detachment: The modern Fabian line often treats economic management as a numbers game rather than a question of social justice. That’s the legacy of the Blair–Brown era.
So, in essence, this looks like the Fabians providing intellectual cover for a policy that would hurt ordinary working people but maintain Labour’s “fiscal credibility” narrative with the media and business elite.
Internal contradictions
The Fabians and some Labour MPs are split on this issue, as the report concedes:
Liam Byrne, who leads the business and trade committee, advocates taxing wealth – including property – more heavily to tackle inequality.
He calls for several reforms to that end, including a shake-up of inheritance tax so that taxes are levied based on how much someone receives over their lifetime rather than the size of the estate. Byrne also proposes replacing council tax and stamp duty with an annual charge based on property values and levying a windfall tax on the banks.
He said: “We will not defeat populism without higher levies on wealth. We will not rebuild Britain without restoring fairness to Britain’s taxes. And we will not restore faith in politics until people see that the rules of the game apply to everyone, from the factory floor to the boardroom and beyond.”
Dromey argues for the threshold freeze — hitting earners; Liam Byrne, on the other hand, calls for higher taxes on wealth — property, inheritance, banks.
That shows the underlying tension within Labour and its policy circles: between the technocrats (Reeves/Dromey) and the traditional social democrats (Byrne).
In effect, Labour is being pulled in two directions — between a Treasury orthodoxy that prioritises “credibility” over redistribution, and its own ideological roots in fairness and equality.
What’s really going on
The Fabians are flying a kite ahead of Reeves’s Budget.
By floating this idea through the think tank, Labour can see how the public and media respond before the Chancellor herself commits.
If the backlash is mild, we can expect this policy — or something very close to it — to appear in the November Budget as a supposedly “responsible” measure that “protects public services without raising tax rates”.
It isn’t. And the fact that the Fabians are pushing it shows just how far to the Right Labour has drifted.
Far enough that Labour MPs might as well be sitting in the Tories’ laps.
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Labour’s love of nuclear shows it still doesn’t understand the words ‘green energy’
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Green Party leader Zack Polanski has exposed the Labour Party’s hypocrisy over green energy – although you might not get that from the mainstream media’s coverage.
Here’s the BBC:
Green Party leader Zack Polanski has criticised government plans to build a new generation of nuclear reactors, calling it old technology that is like “creating a fax machine”.
Centrica and US firm X-energy aim to create up to 2,500 jobs in Hartlepool by building 12 new advanced modular nuclear reactors.
Polanski said it was technology “from a long time ago” and that money would be better spent on wind and solar power, which could deliver thousands of jobs.
Labour MP for Hartlepool Jonathan Brash said the technology was being pioneered in the United States and that the companies were also working with schools and colleges to recruit a local workforce.
“If the green party wanted to destroy 2,500 jobs in Hartlepool, they’re welcome to advocate for it, but I’m right behind this,” Brash told BBC Politics North.
A textbook clash of priorities
What’s really happening here isn’t just a row between the Greens and Labour — it’s a clash between two visions of “the future”.
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Zack Polanski frames nuclear power as obsolete technology — the “fax machine” line neatly crystallises that. It’s a direct attack on the idea that nuclear is modern, clean, or forward-thinking.
His line is soundbite gold. It’s short, vivid, and immediately comprehensible to voters who sense that the Labour government is chasing an outdated industrial dream.
That kind of clarity is exactly why the Green Party is rising. When Labour tries to be both “pro-jobs” and “pro-green”, it ends up in contradictions like this.
Jonathan Brash, meanwhile, frames it as cutting-edge — “advanced modular technology”, “leading the world”, “2,500 jobs”. These are phrases designed to sound futuristic and economically patriotic, appealing to Labour’s working-class base in the north-east.
But there’s a fundamental tension: you can’t call something both “clean” and “nuclear” without addressing the waste problem. The BBC article, predictably, doesn’t mention that at all — it just reproduces both sides’ soundbites and leaves them unexamined.
The real question: what kind of ‘green jobs’?
Brash’s 2,500 local jobs sound impressive until you put them next to Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s own rhetoric. He recently spoke about a plan to create 400,000 green jobs in renewable energy.
hat figure — if Labour is serious about it — dwarfs this nuclear scheme.
So the key question becomes: why is a Labour MP celebrating a fossilised technology when his own party leadership says it wants to lead a renewables revolution?
If you’re building fission reactors that will produce dangerous waste for thousands of years, that’s not green energy — it’s just another stopgap that burdens future generations.
Nuclear as political theatre
There’s a sense here that nuclear power is being used as a symbol of industrial revival rather than an actual solution to the energy crisis.
“£12 billion unlocked for the north-east” seems great in a press release, but those numbers often hide long timelines, huge subsidies, and risk transfer from corporations to taxpayers.
Centrica and X-energy get to trumpet “clean power” and “jobs”, while the UK government says it’s “backing British industry” (falsely – X-energy is based in the United States) — but the long-term costs and clean-up fall on the public purse.
The underlying issue
If the United Kingdom genuinely wants clean, secure, long-term energy, then renewables are already delivering more return for less risk.
Solar and wind can be scaled faster, with far lower environmental costs — and without 10,000-year waste storage plans.
Nuclear power, by contrast, locks the country into a 50-year dependency on expensive infrastructure and hazardous materials.
It’s not “homegrown” energy — it’s imported technology, imported fuel, and exported waste liability.
The UK stands at a crossroads. One path leads to genuine renewables, green industry, and national self-reliance; the other, to legacy tech dressed up as progress, to keep old industrial and political loyalties alive.
Polanski’s stance isn’t radical – it’s simply realistic.
The future of energy isn’t atomic — it’s atmospheric.
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We did better when Income Tax was higher – and it’s time we remembered that
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Rachel Reeves is being accused of preparing to break one of Labour’s key election promises — but the truth is that if she raises Income Tax, she might actually be doing the right thing for once.
The BBC is reporting that the Chancellor has refused to rule out a rise in Income Tax in next month’s Budget, following claims that the Treasury is in “active discussions” about adding a penny to the basic rate.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledged not to raise “the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax” — but Reeves is now under pressure. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says there’s a £22 billion “black hol” in the government’s finances, and there’s almost no room left within her own fiscal rules to borrow or spend more.
Predictably, the media reaction has been loud and shallow: cries of “broken promises” and “tax bombshell” before anyone has even heard the detail.
But step back a little, and a different story appears — one that challenges the idea that lower taxes always mean better lives.
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You see, many of us remember when the basic rate of Income Tax wasn’t 20 per cent. It was 25 per cent — and, frankly, life was better then.
That isn’t nostalgia. It’s reality.
When ordinary working people contributed a little more through tax, we had public services that worked.
The NHS wasn’t gasping for breath.
Local councils could afford to keep parks, libraries and leisure centres open.
Teachers weren’t having to buy classroom supplies from their own pockets.
It wasn’t that we were paying more and getting less — we were paying a fair share and getting value for money.
It’s only since the so-called “low tax revolution” of the past 40 years that life for the average person has become harder, meaner and more precarious.
Taxes have been cut — but wages have stagnated, costs have risen, and public infrastructure has been allowed to rot.
The rich have done very nicely out of that shift.
They can buy private healthcare, private schooling, private security, private everything.
The rest of us have been left with crumbling public services and rising personal bills for things that used to be shared.
That’s what a low-tax economy really means: not more freedom, but more individual risk. Not prosperity, but insecurity.
When Reeves says she wants “those with the broadest shoulders to pay their fair share”, she’s right in principle — but she should also be brave enough to say that rebuilding a broken society takes contribution from everyone.
A one-penny rise in the basic rate of Income Tax would bring in around £8 billion a year — enough to start repairing the damage done by years of austerity and short-term thinking.
That’s not a burden. It’s an investment.
The real betrayal wouldn’t be raising Income Tax. It would be pretending that we can rebuild the United Kingdom on cheap slogans and threadbare budgets.
Reeves has spent months insisting that her fiscal rules must be met — that debt must fall as a share of national income, and day-to-day spending must be paid for by tax revenue rather than borrowing.
If she truly believes in that discipline, then she must also accept its consequence: taxes have to rise somewhere.
The fair, honest approach would be to say so openly — and if she won’t raise a wealth tax as so many of us have pleaded, then it would be better to explain that raising Income Tax, carefully and progressively, can restore what decades of underfunding have taken away.
The UK didn’t fall apart when the basic rate was 25 per cent.
In fact, it thrived.
People could afford homes.
Wages went further.
Communities had life in them.
And all of that depended on a social contract that everyone contributed to.
So instead of panicking about a headline number, perhaps it’s time to remember what those taxes bought us — and to ask whether we can really afford not to pay a little more now.
If Reeves is serious about fixing the country’s finances and rebuilding the public realm, then a modest rise in Income Tax isn’t a betrayal of her promises.
It’s a step towards keeping them.
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