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Dear Joe Public - the doctor strike facts

Posted May 31 2012 1:40pm

There will be a lot of disingenuous and dishonest information spread by the government and various biased sections of the media in the forthcoming weeks ahead, and it is vital that you, the public, are informed of the facts so that they can make up their own minds as to whether a strike is justified.  Just remember that this is the same media that is being shown to be rather free of honesty and morals in the Leveson inquiry.

First and foremost a strike is completely safe and ethical, any strike will not involve emergency services, it will only affect anything that is non-emergency, in fact ironically emergency patients may well get better care than normal during a strike as all elective work will be cancelled.

Secondly there are several key facts that you will not hear in certain sections of the media, certain journalists and newspapers have massive vested interests, they cannot be trusted with their propaganda.  The facts that no one from the government can deny are as follows
1. Our pension fund is in surplus of about 2 BILLION pounds per year.  It is sustainable and it is simply being raided by government to subsidise losses and deficits elsewhere.

2. Doctors have had numerous pay cuts and freezes over the last 20 years or so, compared to their peers from equivalent backgrounds and levels of education, doctors earn significantly less money over their careers.

3. Doctors agreed a new pension deal in 2008 which the government wants to tear up, this already increased contributions hugely, the new proposals which have already been enacted involve doubling the current contributions.

4.  Strangely the pension contributions of politicians and civil servants are not being plundered in the same manner, I wonder why this could be?  Surely the whole public sector should be treated in the same manner and doctors, who already pay a good chunk of their salaries, should not be selectively robbed.

I am biased, I will not deny this but a line in the sand needs to be drawn now and a strike is utterly essential for numerous very solid reasons.  The government is privatising the NHS as we speak and they have no democratic mandate for this.  They now want to steal money from the pension funds of doctors to pay for their errors, of note from pension funds that are accruing about 2 billion pounds of surplus cash per year.

We, doctors, need the public's support and we need you to ignore the dishonest bile that will be thrown in your direction from the likes of the Daily Mail and the BBC.  The vast majority of doctors feel this way.  I love being a doctor, however I am relatively poorly paid in comparison to most of my peer group who did not go into medicine, and all I ask is that our reasonable pensions are not plundered by the incompetent and dishonest fools in government who will tell you numerous porkies in order to make you think that I am greedy or selfish.  This is not the case, I just don't want the government to steal from my pension fund to pay for their negligence and incompetence.  Thanks for listening.
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