“Why should Hospital Doctors be allowed to strike?”
This question is doubtless going to be thrown around a few Christmas dinner tables when conversations get more political than needed. “Lives need to be saved, surely that’s more important than pay cheques! Why can’t they just negotiate for better salaries like everyone else?”
A short answer to the question might be “What other option do they have?”. If they cannot negotiate better salaries in the normal way, what other option is there but to strike.
“But why can’t they just negotiate?” This might seem like a reasonable question, but to answer, we need to understand the difference between “negotiation” and “surrender” in a military context.
Negotiation tends to happen when you have at least two entities who are in dispute and each possessing the power to seriously harm one another with force. Exactly who would win is not necessarily certain, but what is certain is that a lot of people will be killed or injured if these forces ever should clash. Not all of them deservedly so. Since no one wants those people to die, the dispute must be resolved by non-violent means.
Surrender happens when one of the multiple entities no longer has any realistic power to harm the other, and as such they have to accept that the dispute will be resolved in the interest of the party that does have power. When one side no longer has any power to threaten the other, or valuable things to offer them in exchange, surrender is all that they can do.
This distinction between negotiation and surrender is why doctors have to be allowed to strike.
If they can no longer strike, they have no means of force by which they can negotiate for their pay.
Pay negotiation for doctors isn’t like pay negotiation anywhere else. It isn’t as if a doctor at a hospital in one city can say that they will be offered more pay/better conditions in another. Pay-scales and benefit programmes across the NHS are fixed, and while there may be some slight gradations between different hospitals, these are based on regional affordability, not negotiated salary packages.
Also, since the issue is persistent since 2008, with pay being 20% lower than what it was then (factoring in inflation) then clearly normal “negotiation” hasn’t got the result that they want or need.
Add to that the fact that resident doctors have to pay for insurance and other professional memberships out of their own pockets. Payments for things that in other professions would be covered by existing bodies.
And even if doctors cannot vote with their feet to other hospitals or practices, they can leave the UK or indeed the profession as a whole. Data published by the British Medical Journal in August 2025 showed that one third of doctors have taken “hard steps” towards ending their practice of medicine in the UK. Some are looking for UK based non-medical roles, while others are looking to practice medicine in other countries, such as New Zealand, Australia, or Canada.
The GMC’s chief executive, Charlie Massey, said, “Like any profession, doctors who are disillusioned with their careers will start looking elsewhere. Doctors need to be satisfied, supported, and see a hopeful future for themselves.”
Taking away the ability of medical staff to use force to demand better pay will hardly make people more willing to stay. It will feel much more like capture and hostage-taking.
Those who demand that doctors loose the legal ability to strike have to answer the question “How will they compel better pay and conditions?”
If one side has its ability to fight back forcibly removed, what you are left with is not negotiation. It is surrender.
