That’s the trouble with conducting a strike via social media — press the wrong button and what was supposed to be private becomes very public. A leaked cache of WhatsApp messages has revealed the junior doctors’ strikes for what they were: a politicised dispute which always was about more than the finer details of when doctors would be asked to work and what they would be paid for doing so.
The messages, received by the Health Services Journal, reveal how a drawn-out strike was masterminded by the BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee (JDC), a union within a union. The chair of the JDC, Dr Johann Malawana, posed in public as sweet reasonableness all along, declaring in February, for example, that ‘the government can avert this strike action by re-entering talks with the BMA and addressing rather than simply ignoring the outstanding issues and concerns junior doctors have’. Yet in December he had declared privately to his union colleagues that he wanted to draw the dispute out for a ‘prolonged period’ and ‘tie the DH [Department of Health] in knots for the next 18 months’.
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