Minister struggles to defend Keir Starmer over his record of accepting freebies – UK politics live

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Angela Eagle, border security minister, says prime minister has to answer why he has accepted £76,000 worth of gifts since 2019 electionA senior figure in the BMA said this morning that further strikes by junior doctors could not be ruled out in the future.As Denis Campbell reports, yesterday the BMA announced that junior doctors in England had voted to accept the government’s pay offer, ending a dispute that had led to a series of strikes over a period of 18 months.This is the first step towards restoring pay [returning it, in real terms, to what it was in 2008 – the BMA says since then it has fallen by more than a quarter] which is all that doctors have wanted since the beginning of this campaign. As you’ll know, we’ve had a huge pay cut since 2008 but this marks a change in that trajectory.Doctors who were being paid just over £15-an-hour before this offer will now be paid a little over £17-an-hour, so it does mark an improvement, but the journey is not over.And if those pay uplifts don’t occur in a timely fashion and at the pace that our members have asked for to restore our pay, then that’s when we’ll be going to the government, we’ll be going to [Wes Streeting, the health secretary] and saying: ‘You wanted to inspire confidence in this process, this hasn’t inspired confidence in this process, what can we do to alleviate that?’And if those communications break down, then we will be thinking about going back into dispute and striking again if we need to, but that’s always a last case resort, and something we don’t want to have to do.Each part of the pay scale will also be uplifted by 6%, plus £1,000, as recommended by the Review Body on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Remuneration (DDRB), with an effective date of April 1 2024.Both rises mean a doctor starting foundation training in the NHS will see base pay increase to £36,600, up from about £32,400. Continue reading…

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Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/sep/17/keir-starmer-gifts-labour-conservatives-lib-dems-uk-politics-news-latest-updates

Author : Andrew Sparrow

Publish date : 2024-09-17 11:07:03

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