BMA (Contract Negotiations)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Andrew Smith

Monday 21st March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to be here under your chairmanship this afternoon, Sir David. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) on her speech. In introducing the petition, which a large number of members of the public feel strongly about, she managed to explain in just a few minutes how the Government have put forward an entirely false perspective on the dispute from the beginning and continue to do so. I am sure that many more Members would be here for this debate this afternoon were it not for events in the main Chamber. I know that many people want to be present as witnesses or contributors to the dissolution of the Conservative party—not least members of the Conservative party—so perhaps the timing of the debate is unfortunate.

[Mr Andrew Smith]

I understand what my hon. Friend says about what is going on in the main Chamber, but is it not striking that only one Conservative Back Bencher has turned up to defend the Government’s handling of the dispute?

[Andy Slaughter]

I agree with my right hon. Friend, but I think that what the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) said was even more striking in its own way. I felt I could forgo the entertainment in the main Chamber because I feel so strongly about this issue, not least because my constituency hosts two of the main teaching hospitals in the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, and because many thousands of junior doctors from that trust and other trusts live in my constituency. I have therefore followed the dispute with increasing anxiety and depression. I have met not only individual junior doctors but groups of them at Charing Cross hospital, and I have spoken to them at the BMA. The image of them put forward by the Secretary of State, and what we have heard from the governing party today, does no credit to that party. The slurs on junior doctors are extraordinary, and it is perhaps time to pause and consider matters again.

Are we seriously being asked to accept that junior doctors are some sort of militant clique looking to undermine the Government? That is pure fantasy. Anybody who has spent time with junior doctors will have seen exactly what is going on. The speech by the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood was tragic in many ways, but in some ways it was quite brave, because I suspect that any of her constituents who read it will begin to think, “What have I done in electing her last year?”