I have campaigned for years for more funding for the NHS to ensure we have a service that works and that frontline workers like Junior Doctors and nurses get decent pay. I have vigorously opposed the creeping privatisation we have seen over recent years.
We saw the Government apply its policy of austerity when Junior Doctors were given no choice but to go on strike in 2015, 2016 and then 2018. Refusing to pay Junior Doctors fairly, just as with Nurses and other NHS staff is part of the Government strategy of privatisation of the NHS in my opinion.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a hidden policy to ‘encourage’ Junior Doctors to leave the NHS and go into the private sector, in other words part of the strategy to sell off our NHS.
I support a pay rise for Junior Doctors, funded not via short term personal tax increases, but by a proper long-term investment plan for the NHS and social care sector, funded by increasing taxation on the very wealthiest in society.
I was elected on a manifesto that committed to policies that would boost the incomes, job security and living standards of working people in the public and private sector. That manifesto also committed to “restore public sector pay to at least pre-financial crisis levels (in real terms), by delivering year-on-year above-inflation pay rises.”
I stand by those commitments and will continue to campaign to see them implemented wherever possible.
