If Britain had its political priorities in order, the English junior hospital doctors’ dispute would be the dominant domestic issue of the day – and would surely also have been solved by now. Contract talks started nearly four years ago and the dispute came to a head in the autumn, after the Conservatives were elected with a manifesto pledge to introduce “a truly seven-day NHS”, but on terms the doctors opposed. It is now more than three months since the doctors voted by 98% for industrial action; there have been two short strikes, and now there will be three more, the first on 9 March. Meanwhile talks on the pay and working hours contract have broken down and the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has moved to impose the deal, a decision that is being challenged in the courts.
As though that was not a serious enough breakdown in NHS relations, Mr Hunt was on Wednesday embroiled in an emotive argument about numbers which reflected wider lack of trust. Last summer, he said the failure to provide a full seven-day service was responsible for about 6,000 extra deaths a year in England. It now seems that Mr Hunt got the figure two months before the academic study from which it was drawn was published and that officials also blurred the source from which the figure came. Ironically, when the study was eventually published in September, the excess deaths figure was increased to 11,000, though the link to staffing levels could not be proven anyway.
Mr Hunt was made health secretary three years ago with an explicit brief to pour oil on the troubled waters of government-NHS relations following the controversial reorganisation imposed by his predecessor Andrew Lansley. The effort is going badly and getting worse. Mr Hunt’s reputation as custodian of the NHS is terrible: a recent poll found 17% of voters think he is doing a good job while 65% think he is doing a bad one. Tory voters – who normally think well of Tory ministers – give Mr Hunt the thumbs-down too. The public wants a seven-day service but it blames the government for the dispute and thinks the doctors were right to strike.
Jeremy Corbyn was correct to attack the government on the issue on Wednesday at prime minister’s questions. The government is very vulnerable on the NHS. But his attack fell short, partly because the Labour leader was not quick enough on his feet, partly because Mr Cameron cynically turned Mr Corbyn himself into the issue, but particularly because the mood among Tory MPs was to rally loudly behind the prime minister to compensate for the splits over Europe.
In normal political times, Mr Cameron would be worried, and would be right to be worried. A government that picks a fight with doctors takes a big risk. One that continues the fight too long risks lasting alienation of the public. Mr Hunt is clearly becoming a liability, and his mishandling of the dispute now completely overshadows any credit the Conservatives may claim for protecting the NHS budget. But politics is now also in a parallel universe created by the EU referendum in which nothing else matters in government except the result on 23 June. So Mr Hunt continues to blunder, while Mr Cameron cannot risk upsetting his party and the balance in his government any further by getting a grip. Thus the doctors’ dispute grinds on, doing no one at all any good, but with no one able to bring it to the reasonable solution that it so obviously requires.
