Medics have infiltrated BMA in bid to engineer junior doctors walkout
Far left hijacks doctors’ union: Investigation reveals how a unit of militant young medics have infiltrated the BMA in a bid to engineer 72-hour walkout by junior doctors
- Ballot papers will go out tomorrow to 48,000 junior doctors of the BMA
- MoS reveals industrial action is driven by a far-Left faction of union’s leadership
- Leader of doctors is self-named ‘unashamed socialist’ Dr Emma Runswick
A cabal of far-Left young medics has ‘hijacked’ the doctors’ union to push for ‘dangerous’ strikes and demand a jaw-dropping pay rise of up to 30 per cent, a Mail on Sunday investigation reveals.
Ballot papers go out tomorrow to 48,000 junior doctor members of the British Medical Association (BMA) in England ahead of an unprecedented 72-hour walkout in March.
They will not provide emergency care during the strike should it get the go-ahead, raising fears among health leaders that lives will be put at risk.
An investigation by the MoS reveals the militant industrial action is being driven by a far-Left faction that has infiltrated the union’s leadership.
Firebrand: The BMA Council’s Deputy Chair, Dr Emma Runswick, uses the online moniker ‘RedRunswick’
The group appears to have deployed ‘entryist’ tactics similar to those used by the far-Left group Momentum to take over Labour and install Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015.
The ringleader of the far-Left junior doctors is self-described ‘unashamed socialist’ Dr Emma Runswick, 27. She managed to get herself voted to the powerful position of Deputy Chair of the BMA Council – its executive committee – last July.
Her views suggest her ambitions go far beyond simply increasing junior doctors’ pay and are politically driven. She has spoken of how ‘successful unions’ are ‘in dispute often’, adding: ‘Organising for pay restoration also improves our strength as a union to fight for all sorts of changes, locally and nationally.’
Dr Runswick seems to accept that industrial action may put patients at risk, having said: ‘There is harm that comes from delayed elective care and the responsibility for that is not on strikers, it’s on the Government who push us into a position where we have to take strike action.’
The Manchester-based mental health trainee has spearheaded a far-Left faction called Broad Left, which derives its name from a Communist Party strategy developed after the Second World War.
Broad Left has worked hand- in-hand with Doctors’ Vote, a likeminded organisation set up to campaign solely for what both call ‘pay restoration’. The aim – to ‘restore’ junior doctors’ pay to what they describe as 2008 levels in real terms – is now official BMA policy. Asked how much the 30 per cent pay increase would cost, Dr Runswick admitted: ‘Full pay restoration would be in the order of tens of billions per year.’ She claimed this was an ‘affordable’ choice.
Top doctor blasts ‘risk-averse’ NHS
By Stephen Adams, Medical Editor for The Mail on Sunday
The NHS is dogged by ‘incredible inefficiency’ and ‘just throwing money at it’ will not solve the problem, a leading doctor has told The Mail on Sunday.
Consultant anaesthetist Sean Bennett, who has decades of experience working in the health service, said a ‘molly-coddling’, ‘tick-box’ culture has led to a ‘massive’ decline in productivity.
Operating theatres had been transformed from ‘can-do’ environments to being highly risk-averse with operations frequently cancelled for ‘trivial’ reasons, he said.
Dr Bennett said: ‘I see money being wasted in our operating rooms, which run on almost twice the number of staff they used to, but do half the amount of work.’
An expert in pre-planned cardiac and cancer surgery, Dr Bennett worked as an NHS consultant for 20 years before spending eight setting up a clinic in the Middle East. He recently returned but has found the experience ‘frustrating’. He went on: ‘We now frequently cancel for trivial reasons – like the operating room temperature isn’t right.’
He said in the past, consultants led decisions about what surgery would take place, but now nurses tended to do so. And while many experienced nurses were happy with that responsibility, others were not.
The result was a rise in ‘very defensive [medical] practice’ – leading to more cancellations.
Delays meant more ended up ‘down the road’ at private hospitals leaving ‘the NHS paying twice – once for cancelling the case and then to have it done privately’.
His message to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is simple: ‘I’d tell him to look at the culture: it’s now massively bureaucratic, massively defensive, and hugely costly.’
In a podcast interview and a series of online messages unearthed by the MoS, Dr Runswick and fellow activists also bragged about how they have achieved ‘multiple changes at multiple levels of the BMA’ thus ‘changing the direction of the [trade] union’. And they congratulate themselves for being ‘politically very astute’ by ‘inserting candidates sympathetic’ to their agenda in positions of power.
The origins of the current action lie in the ashes of the last junior doctors’ strikes in 2015/16, when the BMA largely capitulated after resistance from Jeremy Hunt, then Health Secretary. But in the last two years, Left-wing juniors including Dr Runswick started agitating. In spring 2021, they castigated the BMA for its ‘inaction over pay’ and demanded it lobby for a 15 per cent pay rise. Chastened, BMA leadership adopted a firmer tone – describing a two per cent pay rise for 2022/23 as ‘unacceptable’. Using the online moniker ‘RedRunswick’, Dr Runswick wrote that October: ‘This change in attitude has happened because of a concerted organising effort among Lefties over the past year, and we have pushed the BMA to a slightly more militant position.’
More than 5,000 junior doctors have joined the BMA in England since 2019.
Membership costs just £10.08 a month for the first three months. There are no restrictions on new members voting, leaving it open to ‘entryism’.
Yesterday, the BMA website stated: ‘If you are not a member, join up so you can take part in the ballot.’
A defining moment came last spring, when union members voted on who would make up the BMA Council for the next four years. Broad Left/Doctors’ Vote candidates secured 26 of 69 places.
In the podcast in June, Dr Runswick said they now made up ‘a substantial proportion of the national executive committee of the BMA and we’re changing the direction of the union’.
Dr Runswick described their 26 as ‘a significant bloc – so that means we are going to have a significant say in the senior leadership team’. Two weeks later she was elected Deputy Chair. Broad Left/Doctors’ Vote is also strongly represented on the BMA’s Junior Doctors’ Committee, which helps decide what industrial action is taken.
The BMA says ‘real terms’ pay cuts since 2008 ‘amount to a 26.1 per cent decline in pay’. Junior doctors’ basic pay in England ranges from £29,384 for those in their first ‘foundation year’ to £58,398 for ‘specialist registrars’, whose next step up the career ladder is to become consultants.
They can earn more on top of this, for example if they work unsociable hours, plus extra if they work in pricey areas such as London.
Last night, Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith said: ‘Doctors deserve better than to have their trade union hijacked in this way by far-Left activists.’
The BMA said it was a democratic organisation and that all of its internal elections followed proper due process.
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