Nigel Farage has described the pay demands of junior doctors as “wholly unreasonable” and said the fault for the pay disparity lies with the British Medical Association.
Speaking on GB News, he said:
“No one’s pretending that being a junior doctor is easy, because it is not. They often have to work under very stressful conditions and they're not paid a huge amount of money and the hours can be tough.
“But of course, in many ways, what they're doing is they're serving an apprenticeship, albeit sometimes quite a long apprenticeship.
“But once they do get up the ladder, then they're on good money for the rest of their working lives and in many cases able to work privately on the side as well.
“In the 75 years of the National Health Service there's never been a strike on this scale.
“Up to 1 million appointments and procedures will be missed. Patients will suffer.
“And bear in mind that excess deaths for last year were 53,000 people, there is no doubt this junior doctors strike will lead to some excess deaths
But their pay demand that they’re making of the government is completely out of kilter and wholly unreasonable.
“Not only is inflation coming down, but supermarket inflation last month fell by quite a long way. We're moving into a different stage of the economic cycle.
“And to say we need a 35% pay rise because our money has fallen behind since 2008, well, that's not really the fault of this government. That's more, I think, the fault of the British Medical Association, who perhaps should have been pushing for pay rises many, many years earlier.
“I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the plight of junior doctors, but this 35% pay demand is totally and utterly ridiculous.
“Now, Victoria Atkins, who is the Conservative minister in charge has said, ‘stop the strike. Let's sit down and talk.’
“But given they got 9% last year, they're being offered another 4% this year; Frankly, they're not going to get much more.
“This is a long running dispute. It is doing great harm to the health of people.“
