Wes Streeting’s Smear Campaign: Flu, Fear and Strikes

The BMA Strikes Back: Accusing Streeting of “Scaremongering the Public”

Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer are weaponising the winter flu crisis to break the BMA, proving once again that this Labour government is more interested in fighting its own workforce than saving the NHS.

When a Labour Health Secretary sounds indistinguishable from his Tory predecessors, something has gone profoundly wrong. Wes Streeting is weaponising winter flu to break the British Medical Association, proving that this government cares more about crushing its own workforce than saving the NHS.

The flu comes every December. It is as predictable as Christmas itself. Yet here stands Streeting, clutching his pearls on LBC, warning of a “double whammy” that will collapse the health service. He describes strikes as the “Jenga piece that collapses the tower,” as though resident doctors are playing games rather than fighting for their professional survival. This is not analysis. It is theatre. Bad theatre at that.

Scaremongering as Strategy

The BMA has directly accused the Health Secretary of being “utterly irresponsible” in exploiting patient and public fears. Dr Jack Fletcher, chair of the resident doctors committee, was unsparing: “It is horrible for anyone to be suffering with flu. We are not diminishing the impact of that. But Mr Streeting should not be scaremongering the public into thinking that the NHS will not be able to look after them and their loved ones.”

Fletcher continued: “He is laying the blame for the failings of the NHS to cope with an outbreak of flu at the feet of resident doctors, and yet he is strangely reluctant to turn that concern into action and come to the negotiating table.”

This cuts to the heart of Streeting’s game. He wants the political benefits of appearing concerned about patient safety without the fiscal cost of actually resolving the dispute. The BMA has offered to meet at any time to avert next week’s strikes. Dr Tom Dolphin, BMA council chair, has confirmed that doctors will ensure patients remain safe during any industrial action. More senior doctors and those not striking will provide urgent and emergency care, with a process in place to call doctors back for major incidents.

In response to Streeting’s apocalyptic warnings, the BMA has gone further. It has written to NHS Trust CEOs asking them to reschedule less urgent activity to prioritise emergency patient care during the strike. This is not the behaviour of a union trying to wreck Christmas. It is the behaviour of professionals trying to protect patients while fighting for their own survival.

Yet the Health Secretary prefers melodrama to negotiation. Speaking to broadcasters, he claimed the NHS faces “probably the worst pressure since Covid,” before immediately pivoting to attack doctors for not delaying their strike to January. When he asks why the BMA won’t simply wait “if they wanted to just give me a kicking,” he reveals the narcissism at the heart of this government’s approach. This is not about him. It is not about giving Labour a beating. It is about doctors who cannot afford to live on their current wages, who face a bottleneck in career progression that threatens to drive them abroad, and who are tired of being used as scapegoats for a health service starved of investment for over a decade.

A Deal Without Dignity

The government’s latest “offer” is a masterclass in misdirection. Emergency legislation to prioritise British and Irish medical graduates for specialty training places, repurposing 4,000 existing roles as training posts, plus reimbursement for exam fees. These are not trivial issues. Training bottlenecks are real. The competition ratio for specialty posts has soared, leaving homegrown doctors competing against international applicants for vanishing opportunities. Addressing this matters.

But here is what the deal does not include: a pay rise.

Not a penny more in wages. Just the promise of preferential treatment in a rigged system, wrapped in the kind of nationalist rhetoric that would make Nigel Farage blush. It is divide and conquer dressed up as workforce planning.

Dr Fletcher described the government’s approach as “cruel and calculated.” He explained: “What is cruel and calculated is the way in which the Health Secretary fails to have any engagement with us outside strikes and then comes to us with an offer he knows is poor and expects us to just accept it within 24 hours.”

This is revealing. Streeting ignores the BMA for months, then manufactures a crisis, presents a take-it-or-leave-it offer with a 24-hour deadline, and acts shocked when doctors reject being bullied. This is not negotiation. It is intimidation disguised as urgency.

Sir Keir Starmer, writing in the Guardian, had the audacity to claim resident doctors have received a 28.9 per cent pay increase over the past three years. This figure is statistical sleight of hand. It aggregates separate settlements to obscure a brutal truth: doctors have suffered a massive real-terms pay cut since 2008. The BMA calculates this at 26 per cent when adjusted for RPI inflation. Even using the government’s preferred CPI measure, independent analysis from the Nuffield Trust and Institute for Fiscal Studies shows pay has fallen between 10 and 16 per cent in real terms since 2010.

A 28.9 per cent “increase” that fails to restore more than a decade of lost value is not generosity. It is a partial correction that still leaves doctors underpaid compared to international peers and their own historical wages. When September’s deal was accepted, the BMA was explicit: this was a step forward, not the destination. Doctors remain over 20 per cent behind in real terms compared to 2008 levels.

And what of Streeting’s previous assurances that restoring pay to 2008 levels was “a journey”? That journey appears to have ended before it began. The current offer includes no pay element whatsoever. The Health Secretary talks about journeys while refusing to take a single step.

Starmer calls the strikes “reckless” and insists they “should not happen.” If the Prime Minister truly believed that, he would instruct his Health Secretary to stop grandstanding and start paying. Instead, we get lectures about affordability from a cabinet earning six-figure salaries while doctors struggle to service student loans that now exceed £100,000.

The Moral Blackmail

There is a cold calculation behind Streeting’s rhetoric. He knows the flu season puts pressure on hospitals. He knows the British public, conditioned by years of austerity propaganda, can be turned against workers demanding fair pay. He is banking on fear. Fear that someone’s grandmother will not get a hospital bed. Fear that the system will collapse. Fear that can be redirected away from government failure and onto the doctors themselves.

This is moral blackmail, pure and simple. The Health Secretary wants to extract maximum political capital from winter illness while offering minimum financial commitment to the professionals who treat it. He speaks of being “genuinely fearful” for the NHS as though he bears no responsibility for its condition. As though thirteen years of Conservative underfunding followed by Labour’s continuation of fiscal restraint has nothing to do with the crisis facing emergency departments this December.

Dr Fletcher put it plainly: “Mr Streeting holds all the cards to both postponing the strike and ending the dispute once and for all, but he seems more interested in political grandstanding and exploiting public fears than he does in doing anything useful that would stop the strikes.”

The BMA has been clear about what would prevent next week’s action: “We do not have to strike next week if he puts an offer on the table that we can accept. Not necessarily enough to end the dispute overall, but enough to stop the strike, we will do just that.”

Instead, Streeting offered to extend the strike mandate to January, as though the BMA exists to manage Labour’s PR calendar. Fletcher was direct in his response: “Instead of offers to extend a mandate and talking of strikes in January, his focus should be on ending strikes altogether and working with resident doctors to do just that. We don’t need sticking plaster fixes; we need workable sustainable solutions.”

The BMA’s ballot result was due on Monday. Members rejected the hollow offer. A five-day strike began on Tuesday. The government had every opportunity to prevent this. It chose performative outrage instead.

An average of 2,660 patients per day were in hospital with flu in England last week – the highest for this time of the year since records began in 2021, and up 55% on the week before, NHS England said.

It is important to note that the records only date back to 2021 and so do not capture the two worst flu seasons of the past 15 years, which were seen in 2014-15 and 2017-18.

Flu cases are also rising in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, figures show.

However, the medical director for the NHS in London, Chris Streather, said the flu situation was “well within the boundaries” of what the NHS could cope with and that hospitals were better prepared for large disease outbreaks since the Covid pandemic.

What the Government Refuses

Here is what Streeting will not discuss: wealth redistribution. Fair public sector pay. Capital investment in the NHS to reduce reliance on overworked staff. An honest reckoning with the fact that you cannot run a modern healthcare system on Victorian philanthropy and the goodwill of exhausted professionals.

Instead, we get jam tomorrow. Training reforms that might materialise by 2026. Exam fee reimbursements that cost peanuts compared to actual pay restoration. The theatrical offer to extend the strike mandate, as though timing matters more than substance.

This is the same playbook the Conservatives used. Refuse to negotiate on pay. Offer non-pay sweeteners. Blame the unions when they reject inadequate deals. Rely on public sympathy for patients to override solidarity with workers. Repeat until the workforce breaks or leaves the country.

Labour promised to be different. In opposition, Streeting said the solution to strikes was to talk to doctors. He positioned himself as the reasonable alternative to Tory intransigence. Now, in power, he sounds like every Health Secretary since 2010. The rhetoric has changed. The refusal to pay has not.

Stand With the Strikers

The resident doctors are not wrecking Christmas. They are fighting for a profession being systematically dismantled by successive governments that view the NHS as a cost to be minimised rather than a service to be cherished. They are demanding what their predecessors earned in 2008, adjusted for inflation. They are asking to be paid what they are worth in a labour market where Australian hospitals will offer them twice the salary and half the hours.

This is not greed. It is survival.

Labour Heartlands stands with the resident doctors. We urge readers to see through Streeting’s scaremongering. The “double whammy” facing the NHS is not flu and strikes. It is underfunding and contempt. Until this government addresses the first and abandons the second, doctors will keep walking out. And they will be right to do so.

The Health Secretary claims there is no money for pay. There is always money when it matters. The question is whether this Labour government believes doctors matter, or whether it has decided that crushing organised labour is more important than saving the health service it claims to love.

The strikes do not have to continue. All it takes is a credible path to pay restoration. The ball is in Streeting’s court. Stop the spin. Start the negotiations. Pay the doctors.

If Labour cannot defend its own workforce, it has no business calling itself the party of working people.