|
I’m not surprised…
… I really am not surprised. Doctor Findlay is dead. There’s a new Doc' in town.
Resident doctors’ Christmas strikes will go-ahead. That much is clear.
What else is clear…
… 83.2 % voted in the weekend survey to continue the December strike, on a 65.34 % turnout… giving the doctors confidence to hold firm.
… while the government is left trying to manage optics and pressure, unable to shift the outcome.
A closer look at the BMA press release tells us only 29,215 doctors, out of a total of ~77k total resident doctors, are running Streeting's NHS.
Either these numbers add nothing to the story, or they are the story.
For Wes Streeting, it’s a disaster-story.
Every time Streeting says 'that's all,' the settlement quietly grows…
… no money for a headline pay-rise and suddenly money for exam fees appears…
… a strike extension offered with a deadline. Today, offered again…
… the doctors know they have him on the run.
Throughout the dispute Streeting has chosen a belligerent stance; escalating the language around flu, winter pressure and patient safety in the hope that Christmas would concentrate minds…
…it hasn’t. The strike exposes the limits of his leverage.
-
Streeting claims strikes disrupt the NHS.
-
NHSE claims they are cracking on with 95% of work without disruption.
Who’s right?
Flu has arrived early with a nasty variant but if his Jenga theory of an NHS collapse doesn’t materialise, Streeting loses credibility when the system somehow, muddles through.
Streeting is a crisis entrepreneur…
manufacturing crises… the NHS is ‘broken’, ‘suffocating duplication at the centre’, strikes will ‘collapse the NHS’… he generates failure to prove he was right and only he can fix it…
… he can’t soften his tone, without appearing wrong, or to blink.
He’s framed the dispute as a test of authority, not what it really is…
... simply a negotiation.
Now, he's in a no-man’s land where the other side appears prepared to absorb reputational damage in pursuit of a longer-term goal.
He’s been outmanoeuvred by the BMA.
He has to learn; how you negotiate matters more than what you negotiate. Positions can be reversed later… tone cannot.
Public belligerence, negative briefings, questioning motives may win a headline but it corrodes trust.
Once the other party believes you are trying to humiliate, corner, or outlast them, they stop problem-solving and start endurance-testing.
-
Negotiations become about not losing, rather than finding a deal.
-
Relationships are damaged less by disagreement, than by disrespect.
-
Credibility is a currency you can only spend once.
Exaggeration, inflated threats, or selective use of evidence may feel useful in the moment, but …
… credibility is non-renewable.
If warnings don’t materialise, if red lines move or if arguments change to suit the day’s front pages, the other side discounts everything you say thereafter.
Critical issues like this can only be solved by collaboration. Understanding both sides have a problem and a search for the middle ground is a mutual responsibility.
-
Respect preserves relationships
-
Credibility enables compromise
Christmas strikes in the beginning of an unusually early flu season worry the public, whatever the arguments. Doctors seem to have accepted that as a cost, making Streeting powerless.
Many doctors no longer see public goodwill as their primary asset. Some are transient, disillusioned, some simply calculating that pay erosion is more immediate than reputational harm.
The doctors are consciously trading moral authority for bargaining power.
Is that wise in the long run? Dunno.
If you need a doctor you're not going to turn one away because they once went on strike.
As for the NHS… I suspect the impact will likely be less dramatic than Streeting's headlines suggest. Trusts are well rehearsed.
Elective work will be cancelled, clinics stood-down, rotas simplified. Christmas already runs at reduced capacity and strike ‘headroom’ has been created for weeks.
The system is prepared.
Every strike normalises cancellations as a management strategy. Waiting lists lengthen by attrition rather than crisis. Non-striking staff absorb yet another disruption.
What'll it do to post-strike workplace relationships… dunno.
Patients already know the NHS can be unreliable and fragile. None of us have the peace of mind we once had about the NHS. That’s eroded over years of political neglect. Strikes add to the anxiety and risk.
This dispute is no longer really about Christmas, or even pay.
It’s about how fast Charmer wakes up to who is running the NHS and the fact Streeting has made a Horlicks of this...
...and how fast he can get everyone around the table at Number Ten.
______________
PS: Anyone want to give odds on the likelihood of some Labour industrial relations legislation in the new year?
| 
