At 7am this morning, resident doctors across England walked out again. The strike runs until Friday. It is the latest round in a dispute that Labour promised it had the maturity to settle, and it is more proof that this government cannot deliver the one thing it was elected to fix. A year in office, and the NHS is still lurching from crisis to crisis.
The Same Old Story
The British Medical Association announced this five-day stoppage by resident doctors after talks broke down once more. Consultants and other staff are being asked to cover, but the reality is simple: appointments will be cancelled, operations will be postponed, and people who have already waited months will wait longer still.
Labour came to power telling the country it would end the strikes that plagued the health service. Instead, walkouts have become a permanent feature of the calendar. NHS analysis put the number of appointments and procedures lost to industrial action in 2025/26 at around 171,776. Every one of those is a patient pushed to the back of the queue.
A Waiting List That Will Not Shift
Ministers will point to the fact that the waiting list has edged down for a second month, with an estimated 7.36 million treatments outstanding at the end of May. They are entitled to claim that. But let us be honest about the scale of it: more than seven million people are still waiting, and a five-day doctors' strike is the surest way to reverse what little progress has been made. You cannot cut a waiting list while the wards are half-staffed.
The truth Labour will not face is that the health service does not just need money thrown at it. It needs grip. It needs a government capable of sitting down with the workforce and reaching a settlement that sticks, rather than one that limps from one ballot to the next.
Leadership Vacuum
It does not help that the department has been in turmoil. The man who was meant to be steadying the ship resigned amid the wider collapse inside the Cabinet. You cannot run a health service this size when the political leadership is consumed by its own survival. Patients in Preston East and across Lancashire are not interested in Westminster psychodrama. They want to be seen, treated, and sent home.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would treat the NHS as a service for patients, not a battleground for ideology. We would get serious about retaining the British-trained doctors and nurses we already have, by fixing pay structures and cutting the managerial bloat that swallows money before it reaches the front line. We would back reform that rewards productivity and frees clinicians to treat people, rather than drowning them in paperwork.
Above all, we would negotiate in good faith and in the national interest. The strikes will keep coming until someone in government is honest about the problem and competent enough to fix it. On the evidence of this week, that someone is not in this Cabinet.