Six full days. 144 hours. The fifteenth round of industrial action since 2023. Resident doctors walked out across England between 7 and 13 April and the Prime Minister had nothing more to offer than a 3.5 per cent pay offer and the quiet withdrawal of a promise to create 1,000 extra specialty training posts. The BMA rejected both. The strikes went ahead. And patients paid the price, as patients always do.

Labour Promised To End The Strikes

Cast your mind back to the general election. One of the central Labour claims was that only a Labour government could "reset the relationship" with NHS staff and end the strikes. The Prime Minister told voters he had a plan. Junior doctors would come back to the table. The waiting lists would fall. The NHS would be, in that famous phrase, "fixed".

What has actually happened? The strikes have continued — fifteen of them. The waiting list has risen to 7.31 million cases, representing 6.19 million unique individuals. The diagnostic waiting list alone contains 1.68 million waits for fifteen key tests. And the relationship between the government and the medical profession is, if anything, more poisonous than it was under the Conservatives. The "reset" never happened.

The Pay Offer Is Not The Point

Let's be honest about pay. Resident doctors do punishing training. Their pay should reflect it. But the strike is not really about the specific 3.5 per cent figure. It is about the sense — widespread across the NHS workforce — that this government does not take the profession seriously. Ministers agreed a deal, moved the goalposts at the last minute, and withdrew a training-post commitment that would have eased the very staffing crisis they are meant to be solving.

You cannot motivate a workforce that does not trust you. Labour have had a year to build that trust and they have squandered it. The BMA's decision to strike again is not primarily about the money. It is about the absence of credibility on the other side of the negotiating table.

The Patient Is The Forgotten Party

Let's talk about the person who didn't get a hip replacement this month because the theatre was shut. Let's talk about the cancer patient whose scan was pushed back because radiology ran skeleton staff. Let's talk about the pensioner in Preston who was told their follow-up appointment was being rescheduled to July. Each of those people exists. Each of them is being failed by a system that has forgotten they are the reason it exists in the first place.

The NHS Confederation can talk all it likes about staff "delivering 95 per cent of normal activity" during industrial action. The 5 per cent is still enormous in human terms. And the cumulative effect of fifteen strikes, plus a rising waiting list, plus a diagnostic backlog, plus chronic understaffing in primary care, is an NHS which is visibly failing its patients. This is not a legacy Labour can blame on the previous government. This is their record.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK is clear that the NHS needs structural reform, not more money poured into the same broken system. That means real accountability for managers. It means using private capacity to clear the backlog — there is no ideological reason to leave a patient in pain for eighteen months when a local independent provider could treat them in a fortnight. It means training British doctors and nurses in far greater numbers rather than relying on year-on-year migration to plug the gaps. And it means treating the workforce — including resident doctors — with the respect a deal once made is expected to be kept.

Starmer's government has had its shot at fixing the NHS. A year in, the strikes are worse, the waiting list is longer, and the trust is gone. Voters are paying attention.