Dear Joe Public - the doctor strike facts

There will be a lot of disingenuous and dishonest information spread by the government and various biased sections of the media in the forthcoming weeks ahead, and it is vital that you, the public, are informed of the facts so that they can make up their own minds as to whether a strike is justified.  Just remember that this is the same media that is being shown to be rather free of honesty and morals in the Leveson inquiry.

First and foremost a strike is completely safe and ethical, any strike will not involve emergency services, it will only affect anything that is non-emergency, in fact ironically emergency patients may well get better care than normal during a strike as all elective work will be cancelled.

Secondly there are several key facts that you will not hear in certain sections of the media, certain journalists and newspapers have massive vested interests, they cannot be trusted with their propaganda.  The facts that no one from the government can deny are as follows:

1. Our pension fund is in surplus of about 2 BILLION pounds per year.  It is sustainable and it is simply being raided by government to subsidise losses and deficits elsewhere.

2. Doctors have had numerous pay cuts and freezes over the last 20 years or so, compared to their peers from equivalent backgrounds and levels of education, doctors earn significantly less money over their careers.

3. Doctors agreed a new pension deal in 2008 which the government wants to tear up, this already increased contributions hugely, the new proposals which have already been enacted involve doubling the current contributions.

4.  Strangely the pension contributions of politicians and civil servants are not being plundered in the same manner, I wonder why this could be?  Surely the whole public sector should be treated in the same manner and doctors, who already pay a good chunk of their salaries, should not be selectively robbed.

I am biased, I will not deny this but a line in the sand needs to be drawn now and a strike is utterly essential for numerous very solid reasons.  The government is privatising the NHS as we speak and they have no democratic mandate for this.  They now want to steal money from the pension funds of doctors to pay for their errors, of note from pension funds that are accruing about 2 billion pounds of surplus cash per year.

We, doctors, need the public's support and we need you to ignore the dishonest bile that will be thrown in your direction from the likes of the Daily Mail and the BBC.  The vast majority of doctors feel this way.  I love being a doctor, however I am relatively poorly paid in comparison to most of my peer group who did not go into medicine, and all I ask is that our reasonable pensions are not plundered by the incompetent and dishonest fools in government who will tell you numerous porkies in order to make you think that I am greedy or selfish.  This is not the case, I just don't want the government to steal from my pension fund to pay for their negligence and incompetence.  Thanks for listening.

Risk-free profits for the vultures begin

This excellent article from Allyson Pollock sums up the disaster that Lansley's terrible NHS reforms are.  It is clear that the market is fake and that many private sector vultures are set to make massive profits at the expense of the tax payer.  It is an utter scandal.

There is no accountability or transparency, meaning that the market is a sham, there is no real competition.  This Bill has been created with the help of the private sector for the private sector, the conflicts of interest are a disgrace.  This is the Lansley and Cameron's idea of open accountable democracy:

"The public cannot make a fully informed judgement about the contract, because both the Treasury and Department of Health have refused to release key information, despite repeated requests under the Freedom of Information Act. "

Pollock sums it all far better than I can:

"The speed at which contracts have been let and the lack of public consultation inevitably seeds suspicions of corruption; but it is politicians who have seriously misled the public over the NHS.......The current lack of disclosure is a public scandal."

It is good to see the current corrupt government paying for their sins in the local elections, the problem is Labour are not much better, the real disgrace is that our democracy is but a sham, voters have no real choice and this will result in reducing voter turnout in elections, increased apathy and a rise in the extremist far right vote.  Thanks Cameron and Clegg, you are a disgrace to this country.