Resident doctors deserve real-terms pay rise after working through Covid, says BMA
The British Medical Association has defended resident doctors’ pay claim ahead of talks with the health secretary, saying they did not work through the Covid pandemic only to end up with a real-terms pay cut,Wes Streeting is due to meet BMA representatives this week as he looks to avert five days of strikes in England due to start on 25 July,Doctors voted to take the action in pursuit of a 29% pay rise which the BMA has said is needed to replace what they have lost over years of cuts,“We are still down compared to even the pandemic in 2020,” Dr Emma Runswick, a resident doctor in Greater Manchester and deputy chair of the BMA council, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday,She said doctors’ “reward” for working to get the country through Covid was a “real-terms pay cut” – suggesting this was not the treatment they had expected during the days when people lined their streets to clap for health workers.
Runswick was asked why the BMA had chosen to base its pay claim on the retail prices index (RPI) – a measure of inflation the Office for National Statistics no longer considers official – rather than the consumer price inflation (CPI), which is official and tends to be lower.She told the programme the government still used RPI “when it suits them” – including for calculating how much people’s train fares, car-related taxes and the rates paid on debts such as student loans increase by each year.Therefore, she suggested, it was fair to take into account the effects of those on resident doctors, formerly known as junior doctors, when determining their pay claim.Speaking to the Guardian last week, the BMA’s new chair, Tom Dolphin, said the union would not negotiate on the figure, which simply restored doctors’ losses since 2008 rather than increasing their pay.He blamed the five-day strike on Streeting agreeing to a 22% pay rise over two years last year, but not following it up with an award this year to take account of the 29% claim.
“Our expectation was that the [22%] would be the start of a journey that would keep us going until we’d reached the value we had in 2008,So, clearly, the return of value has stopped and now it’s just marching on the spot,And we need to carry on that journey,It [29%] is reasonable because it’s based on the loss of value that we’ve had,The number is this big because [previous] governments serially ignored the BMA when we said this is building up a problem.
”Asked if unions such as the BMA and Royal College of Nursing would be handed whatever pay rises they wanted, the chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, said: “No, because – of course – public sector pay has to be affordable in the context of the broader economy.That’s why we need to make sure that we have a strong and resilient economy that is growing in order to have the tax receipts to pay for our public services.Public sector workers know that.”When Labour entered government, Jones said, the Conservative administration “weren’t even talking to public sector workers”.He added: “We’ve reset that relationship.
We’ve honoured pay review body recommendations, which are an independent process in line with our affordability guidelines.And we have to be clear with the pay review bodies and public sector workers what is and isn’t affordable, which is what we’ve done.”
Artist or activist? For Juliet Stevenson and her husband, Gaza leaves them with no choice
Read any celebrity-signed open letter advocating for social justice over the past few years and you’ll probably spot Juliet Stevenson’s name. When the veteran actor is not gracing screens or on a stage somewhere, she’s out on the streets brandishing a placard or giving speeches about human rights, gender equality and the Palestinian right to self-determination.Just last month, she wrote in the Guardian about the British government’s “complicity” in the Gaza atrocities and what she called an attempt to repress civil liberties by proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group.Critics may – and they do – disparage Stevenson as a “luvvie” engaging in typical performative liberal politics, but spend just a few minutes with the actor and her husband – the anthropologist, film-maker and writer Hugh Brody – and you quickly discover that the roots of their activism run far deeper than that.In fact, the fight for peace and justice in Palestine is something that has defined the couple’s relationship for 32 years, particularly because Brody is Jewish and the son of a Holocaust survivor
‘History’s most devastating document of war’: the simple yet graphic details of the Bayeux tapestry
“Angli et Franci” – these Latin words embroidered on the Bayeux tapestry may be the first time those cartoon rivals, the English and the French, were named together. But in one of the shifts from triumph to horror that make this epic work of art still gripping almost a millennium after it was made, the full sentence reads: “Here at the same time the English and French [or Angles and Franks] fell in battle”. Below the black lettering, horses and chainmailed riders are thrown about and upside down in a bloody tangle. In the lower margin lie corpses and a severed head.Now, in an unprecedented piece of cultural diplomacy between the Angli and Franci, this 70-metre long Romanesque wonder, preserved for centuries in Bayeux, Normandy, is to go on show at the British Museum
My cultural awakening: I joined Danny Wallace’s accidental positivity cult – and found the love of my life
I was aimless and lonely after finishing my A-levels. Then a friend recommended the author’s book and everything changedThe spring after my A-levels was not going the way I planned. I was 19, hadn’t got the required grades for any of my university choices and hadn’t saved for a gap year. My friends were off enjoying their new lives and I was stuck at home in Essex with my disappointed parents, doing occasional temp work.Then I read Join Me by the writer and comedian Danny Wallace
Watch the Skies to Wet Leg: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead
Watch the SkiesOut now With the return of all things Y2K in fashion and music, it makes sense that the turn of the millennium fascination with little green men would likewise be back in vogue. But this sci-fi about a teenager teaming up with an agency that investigates paranormal phenomena is notable for its futuristic qualities too: it uses AI dubbing technology to create an English-language film from the Swedish original.SupermanOut now Superman is dead, long live Superman: wave goodbye to handsome hunk Henry Cavill’s stint as the man of steel and say hello to the new era of equally handsome hunk David Corenswet, a veteran of two Ryan Murphy series on Netflix. At the helm of this reboot is James Gunn, the director behind diverse entertainments including Slither and Guardians of the Galaxy.Michael Haneke RetrospectiveVarious venues nationwide; to 30 July The Austrian director is known for making films that are often kind of a bummer, but also bona fide masterpieces
The Guide #198: Such Brave Girls shows that grown-up gross-out comedy is thriving
The best binge-watches should make you feel a little bit sick while you gorge on them, and Kat Sadler’s sitcom Such Brave Girls, which just returned for a second season on BBC Three and iPlayer, certainly fits that description. I found myself burning through episodes, the enjoyment of them tempered with the slightest top note of nausea.That isn’t a criticism of the series, which follows the chaotically bleak existence of adult sisters Josie (Sadler) and Billie (Lizzie Davidson), still living at home with their wild-eyed mother, Deb (Louise Brealey). In fact it’s the intended reaction. From its logo (the title of the show made out in strands of wet hair slithering across bathroom tiles) onwards, Such Brave Girls is built to shock, unsettle and gross out, but above all be laughed at
‘What should be taught in schools?’: the infamous ‘Scopes monkey trial’ turns 100
Her great-grandfather was a doctor called to attend to the lawyer who put the case for creationism. Her great-grandmother was related to Charles Darwin. And now she works in the courthouse where the “trial of the century” – in which a high school teacher was accused of illegally teaching evolution – began exactly a century ago on Thursday.No one has a perspective on the “Scopes monkey trial” quite like Pat Guffey, a former high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee. As the city prepares to mark the centenary with a week-long festival including a dramatic re-enactment of the court battle, she is aware how its legacy proved both a blessing and a curse
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