Doctors, Strikes and the Failures of Wes Streeting and Labour

Yves here. While there has been a bit of reporting that has made its way across the pond about financial and other stresses at the NHS, I must confess to not knowing that doctors had been threatening to strike and the odds of that happening look high. So it looks like Keir Starmer’s fixation with Project Ukraine is having a measure of success by relegating this fiasco to secondary media coverage.

It’s not hard to see that (just like with the US VA system), the NHS has been squeezed financially to make it hard to deliver good care, so as to justify privatization. I wish this article presented the doctors’ demands. However, even if there was a sea change in the government’s position, it would still take time and investment to reverse the effects of budgetary starvation.

As to the politics, a query and an observation. I thought Wes Streeting hoped to succeed Starmer and indeed in some way depended on Starmer to raise his odds of success. Am I correct in understanding that this was due to the fact that Streeting was too right wing for most Labour members, but he might be able to position himself as the only option that remained? I would assume regardless that a mess at the NHS would very much dim whatever prospects he had.

The observation is that Murphy contends that this year’s flu arrived early but there is “no clear indication as yet” that this flu season will be seriously bad. IMHO that is unduly optimistic. First, the current variant is nasty, to the degree that the authorities are recommending mask wearing. The Nikkei has carried prominent stories about the severity of the surge in Japan:

🚨 GLOBAL FLU SURGE ALERT 🚨 Reports say H3N2 influenza is spreading across Europe and parts of Oceania and Asia, including the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, with hospital footage showing patients experiencing symptoms such as fever and… pic.twitter.com/zvgFRw9X8g

— Ray Escobar (@raymonix_00) December 15, 2025

UK: Super flu is ‘beyond catastrophic’

“Just two weeks before Christmas, top clinicians say this is the worst winter they have seen”

The Independenthttps://t.co/J8JDTIVdmN

— CoronaHeadsUp (@CoronaHeadsUp) December 15, 2025

And as we have been reporting (see today’s Links for yet more examples) evidence continues to mount that past Covid infection increases vulnerability to other contagions.

By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future

The confirmation that resident doctors will strike over Christmas was entirely predictable, as Roy Lilley has noted in his NHS-related daily email today.

An 83.2 per cent vote to continue action, on a solid turnout, signals confidence and discipline.

But what is also clear is that this is not just a labour dispute, as Wes Streeting is trying to claim, or a disgrace, as Keir Starmer would have it. This is a dispute about who is responsible for a system already stretched close to breaking point.

Doctors are very clear that it is not them, and with good reason.

They are equally clear that the failure is on the part of successive politicians, all of them sharing the same austerityculture.

The public has no difficulty deciding who to side with in this case: doctors are not the problem, and are the ones seeking the solution to it.

The public blames politicians who are now trying to pin the blame on doctors for an NHS crisis of Labour’s own making, which attempt is backfiring as a result.

Wes Streeting has compounded the problem. He has chosen belligerence over negotiation, framing a pay dispute as a test of authority and repeatedly warning of NHS collapse, winter crisis and patient harm. Christmas was supposed to concentrate minds. It has not. Instead, each supposed “final” position he has suggested has quietly expanded, revealing successive weakness on his part rather than strength. The doctors know they have him on the run.

This is ultimately a credibility failure. Exaggerated threats, shifting red lines and hostile briefings may win headlines, but they corrode trust. Once trust is lost, negotiations become endurance contests rather than problem-solving exercises. That is where this dispute now sits, and the BMA has outmanoeuvred the government as a result.

The NHS will almost certainly muddle through the strikes. Trusts are well rehearsed. Elective work will be cancelled, rotas simplified, and Christmas capacity reduced as it always is. If the apocalyptic scenario does not materialise, as is likely, Streeting’s authority weakens even further, and for all the rhetoric, there is no clear indication as yet that the UK is suffering a serious flu crisis this year; it may be nothing more than normal, but just earlier than usual.

Doctors are, admittedly, consciously trading public goodwill for bargaining power, judging pay erosion to be the greater threat. But this dispute is no longer really about Christmas or even pay. It is about who runs the NHS, how fragile it has become after years of neglect, and how quickly Number Ten realises this needs to be resolved through respect, negotiation and competence and not confrontation.

The problems are that:

• No.10 can’t sack Wes Streeting right now, even though he is hopelessly out of his depth and has grossly mismanaged this dispute by making it personal.
• No.10 has also made it personal, which was a gross error of judgment on their part.
• Labour has, as a result, nowhere to go but lose, as they are bound to do.

What a mess.

And we, and doctors, are paying the price for yet another government that has no clue how to negotiate anything.