Junior doctors and members of the British Medical Association (BMA) outside Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, January 3, 2024
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NHS campaigners issued a furious response after he told LBC: “I cannot guarantee, I honestly don’t want to catastrophise or sensationalise, I cannot sit here and look you in the eye and tell you that no patient will come to harm.”
BMA resident doctors’ committee chair Dr Jack Fletcher said: “Ultimately, the health secretary has far more power to prevent NHS strikes than he gives himself credit for; not through confrontation, but by rebuilding trust and putting an offer on the table that creates sufficient brand-new training places for doctors, not changing the names of existing roles.
“His current offer does not create any more capacity for us to treat patients, or do anything to help clear waiting lists; let’s be clear about that.”
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Keep Our NHS Public co-chair Dr Tony O’Sullivan told the Morning Star: “It is the height of irresponsible behaviour from the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, to go to war with doctors and the BMA amid the flu epidemic and this, the second winter crisis since the Starmer–Streeting administration took office.
“The government cannot pretend that they had no warning, that they didn’t see it coming. Nor should they deny that it is their responsibility to deal with it.
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“The government must take action to give NHS resident doctors, and other staff, the remuneration they deserve.
“But instead, as with the scapegoating of migrants and asylum-seekers as the cause of multiple ills, the government’s self-serving reaction is to scapegoat doctors and their union, the BMA, for the NHS crisis Labour was voted into office to solve.”
Junior doctors and members of the British Medical Association (BMA) outside St Thomas’ Hospital, London, January 3, 2024
BMA hits back at Streeting’s ‘juvenile delinquency’ and ‘moaning minnies’ accusations
HEALTH SECRETARY Wes Streeting put himself on the warpath with the BMA union today, [yesterday] saying he has “had it” while accusing doctors of “juvenile delinquency” and being “moaning minnies” as they prepare Christmas strikes.
His tantrum came as the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned that a corridor care crisis could be repeated in English hospitals this winter.
BMA council chair Dr Tom Dolphin said: “It’s disappointing that, despite his comments about wanting to reach an agreement to call off this month’s strikes, the Secretary of State spent the morning making disparaging remarks about our members in the media rather than getting around the table with us.
“We’re surprised at the tone he’s taking, as we’re very much looking forward to meeting with him and his department to settle the various disputes for the good of both doctors and patients. We’re ready to meet him any time.”
Jeremy Corbyn, with Zarah Sultana (not pictured) speaking at a discussion on Your Party, their new political party, at The World Transformed conference, at Niamos Radical Arts Centre in Hulme, Manchester, October 10, 2025
With ‘Your Party’ holding its founding conference in Liverpool this weekend, JEREMY CORBYN speaks to Morning Star editor Ben Chacko about its potential, its priorities — and a few of its controversies too
JEREMY CORBYN says the Palestine solidarity movement is a game changer in British politics.
“The Palestine movement is absolutely huge. And like the movement against the Vietnam war of the 1960s, which had a huge impact on political thinking — the rather fossilised structure of both major parties started to disintegrate after that — it means things have to change.”
It’s one of the reasons he says the time is right for a new mass party of the left. “Your Party,” as it is provisionally known, has its founding conference this weekend.
“In my estimation at least two million people in Britain have done something about Palestine over the past 18 months — attend demonstrations, marches, meetings, sent emails, signed petitions.
“A lot of people are coming together on Palestine and at all the Palestine events I’ve been at there’s been a huge interest in the idea of a new party.”
Corbyn, meeting the Morning Star in his Westminster office, isn’t saying one issue would be enough to build a mass movement for change on — but the immense public anger at our Establishment’s complicity in a genocide is a galvanising moment.
One that comes at a time ripe for Labour to be challenged from the left.
“Labour has lost all appeal to the radical sections of the population.” And that, today, means a lot of people.
“Nobody really believes the left are going to be back in power in the Labour Party, because of the structural changes Starmer has brought in,” says Corbyn. Changes everyone knows are intended to prevent anything like Corbyn’s own 2015-20 leadership of the party happening ever again.
“Now is the time for a left party in the tradition of the labour movement. That is where I see myself. I am not leaving the labour movement. I am helping form a political party which will be part of the labour movement.
“We must challenge the ‘triopoly’ of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems on political, social, environmental and economic thinking. They all believe in austerity, they all believe in market economics, they’re all running away from addressing the environmental crisis and on social justice issues.
“Labour had a ‘loveless landslide’ just over a year ago in the election. A spectacularly low vote for a party moving into government.” Corbyn points out that, while “we didn’t win either election, I fully appreciate that,” the highest Labour votes at general elections this century were both under his leadership, in 2017 and 2019. An important reminder that the idea socialist policies are unpopular at the ballot box is a media-manufactured myth.
Since coming to power Starmer’s government has been “disastrous. Maintaining the two-child benefit cap [finally lifted a day after we spoke], trying to take away the winter fuel allowance, attempting to remove personal independence payments from disabled people.”
On housing, he slams Labour’s refusal to take on the private rental sector or stand up to for-profit builders, who have a stranglehold on construction and resist efforts to include social and council housing in new builds.
He also ties the government’s decision to ramp up military spending to “effective cuts to every other area of public spending.” The government claims it’s increasing spending on the NHS, but he points out that two hospitals near him in north London are cutting spending by £20 million — and all over the country similar cuts are taking place across hospital trusts.
The increased military budget covers “a new generation of nuclear weapons and for the first time since the 1960s airborne nuclear bombs being stationed in Britain. There is no agenda for anything other than war.” And back to the trigger issue, Gaza: “A Labour government has carried on selling arms to Israel while a genocide is going on.”
The appetite for a party that will challenge all this is obvious. But a lot has changed on the British left since Your Party was first announced in July. Most notably, under a new leader, Zack Polanski, the Greens have shifted dramatically left and exploded in size, with many of those joining believed to be from the same 800,000 people who expressed interest in Your Party. Is another left party needed in that context, and isn’t the left becoming a crowded field?
“I want to be part of a socialist party — one fundamentally about social and economic transformation. I agree with a lot of what the Greens say, especially on environmental issues, and will work with them. Just last night I was working with the Greens on an amendment to the English Devolution Bill.
“But this is at root about public ownership and workers’ control.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.Vote Labour for Genocide.
More patients than promised in NHS England’s recovery plan are still waiting more than six weeks for an X-ray or scan. Photograph: Lankowsky/Alamy
Public accounts committee finds Labour’s progress ‘appears to have stalled’ despite billions of pounds in investment
The NHS has failed to cut waiting times as promised in its recovery plan despite billions of pounds in investment, the public accounts committee (PAC) has warned.
The influential parliamentary committee’s verdict raises serious doubts over whether Labour can fulfil its key pledge to voters to “fix the NHS” by ensuring that patients can once again get hospital care within 18 weeks by 2029.
In a scathing report, the cross-party PAC warns that improvements in providing faster tests and treatment have “stalled”. And it criticises Keir Starmer and the health secretary, Wes Streeting, for ordering a costly, unplanned reorganisation of the NHS in England. It said this could damage care and was reminiscent of the shambles surrounding the HS2 rail project.
Far more patients than promised still have to wait more than 18 weeks for non-urgent hospital care – sometimes for more than a year – and more than six weeks for an X-ray or scan, it found. “Progress in reducing waiting times appears to have stalled, with the total elective care waiting list standing at 7.4m clinical pathways,” the report says – about 220,000 fewer than when Labour took power in July 2024.
The PAC’s conclusions will alarm ministers, who are keenly aware that the public’s top priority is to see NHS waiting times fall, and that Reform UK has recently supplanted Labour as the party that voters see as having the best policies on healthcare.
Its gloomy verdict contrasts sharply with the upbeat picture of progress in the NHS during Labour’s 16 months in power that Streeting painted last week.
… Reform UK has recently supplanted Labour as the party that voters see as having the best policies on healthcare. …
??? It’s remarkable that the electorate is so poorly informed …
Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.Nigel Farage attacks the NHSNigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivers a speech in the media briefing room of 9 Downing Street in central London, ahead of the Budget later this month, November 4, 2025
ACADEMICS and campaigners have called on Chancellor Rachel Reeves to drop “dangerous and damaging” NHS private finance plans ahead of the autumn Budget next week.
The government is considering new PFI-style deals to build “neighbourhood health centres” under plans to move care from hospitals into community settings.
In their 10-year NHS plan, ministers set out the possibility of relying on public-private partnerships (PPP) to fund the centres, fuelling concerns that taxpayers could be left footing the bill for high borrowing costs.
Campaigners gathered outside the Department of Health and Social Care yesterday in a protest organised by We Own It to demand a halt to the plans.
The anti-privatisation group has also co-ordinated a letter, signed by 50 academics, which calls on Ms Reeves to “abandon this dangerous and damaging proposal and fund public services through direct taxation or borrowing.”
Signed by figures such as Lord Sikka, the letter calls the arguments for private finance “bogus” and warns Ms Reeves that “using private capital in the NHS is no different from a family buying their home using a payday loan.”
Campaigners have warned about the dangers of risking a repeat of disastrous PFI (private finance initiative) schemes, in which private firms funded the building of hospitals, while high-interest repayments were made over the long term.
Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research found that for just £13 billion of investment, the NHS was landed with an £80bn bill.
Junior doctors and members of the British Medical Association (BMA) outside Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, January 3, 2024
Junior doctors and members of the British Medical Association (BMA) outside St Thomas’ Hospital, London, January 3, 2024
