From 7am on Tuesday 7 April through to 7am on Monday 13 April, resident doctors across England walked out. Six full days of industrial action. Routine operations cancelled. Clinics rearranged. Diagnostic tests pushed back into waiting lists that were already some of the longest in NHS history. This is the fifteenth round of strikes since 2023, and Labour promised the country they were the people who could fix it.

Remember that promise? The Health Secretary boasted in the summer of 2024 that Labour's relationship with the medical unions would end the disputes the Conservatives could not resolve. Two years later, we're on round fifteen. The only thing that has changed is the label on the party in charge.

A 3.5 Per Cent Offer and a Fifteenth Walkout

The current dispute centres on the government's proposed 3.5 per cent pay increase for 2026/27. The BMA says it isn't enough. Resident doctors argue their pay has been eroded over more than a decade and want full restoration rather than phased increases dragged out across multiple settlements. You can argue the rights and wrongs of that all day. What you cannot argue is that the current approach — offer, rejection, strike, repeat — is achieving anything at all except the slow strangulation of elective care.

The numbers tell the story. This strike will once again force hospitals to push back thousands of planned procedures. Emergency care will just about hold together, as it always does, because NHS staff are the most professional workforce in the country. But the person who needed a hip replacement, a cataract operation, a diagnostic scan — they've been told to wait. Again.

The Patients Have No Union

This is where politics matters most. Every strike has two sets of losers: the doctors who are genuinely frustrated, and the patients who are entirely voiceless. The patients have no union. The patients cannot walk out. The patients simply wait.

And who is waiting? The grandmother in Preston whose knee replacement has been rescheduled three times. The self-employed joiner who can't work until his carpal tunnel surgery is done. The young parent who has been on a mental health waiting list for eighteen months. These are not statistics. They are constituents. I hear from them. I know their names.

A government that cannot end industrial action in its flagship public service is failing. Full stop. The test of competence in politics is not whether you can make promises — it's whether you can deliver outcomes. On the NHS, Labour is failing that test as comprehensively as its predecessor did.

Paying More and Getting Less

Let's also be honest about the structural problem. The NHS already consumes an enormous share of the national budget, and we keep pouring more in. Yet performance gets worse. Waiting lists stay stubbornly high. Productivity has declined compared with the 2010s. The model itself — centralised, monopoly-funded, command-and-control — is creaking under the pressure of demographic change and demands that were never anticipated when it was designed in 1948.

You cannot fix a broken machine by shovelling more coal into it. Throwing money at a system that is fundamentally unreformed just inflates the costs without improving the outputs. That is the unglamorous truth nobody at the dispatch box wants to say.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would settle the current pay dispute with a serious, one-off deal — not another drip-feed offer that prolongs the agony — and tie any future pay reviews to clear productivity benchmarks so that patients, not lobbyists, benefit. We would strip back the managerial bloat that now makes up a shocking proportion of NHS headcount and redirect those savings to the front line. And we would reform the funding model itself, introducing real choice and genuine competition from independent providers, so that British patients get the outcomes common in Germany, France and the Netherlands.

The NHS deserves better than tired slogans and fifteen rounds of strikes. British doctors deserve a fair settlement. British patients deserve an operation when they need it, not a cancellation letter. The current government has run out of ideas. The country cannot afford to keep waiting.