Remarkably but not unusually unaware, the Guardian has this today:

With a general election now on the horizon, MPs are starting to talk about the prospect of strikes straddling two administrations. Will some calculate that if they hold out a few months longer their pay deals would be done by a Labour government, which might find them politically harder to refuse? By publicly readying for a spring election, no matter how unlikely some think that is in practice, the government has opened up that possibility.

Junior doctors’ leaders seem intent on driving change within their institutions and shifting broader attitudes to public services, but their battle has also become emblematic of a wider struggle among young professionals in seemingly good jobs to buy a house, cover the nursery fees and build the kind of life that used to come with a graduate salary. If Labour has answers to that deeper malaise, they are not quick or easy. While Streeting clearly longs to move on and talk about reforming preventive care, or how technology can transform services, the junior doctors are awkwardly probing Labour’s sore spot – which is that reform is necessary to putting the NHS back on its feet but obviously not sufficient. Somehow, from somewhere, there will have to be more money than currently promised. It is Labour’s sheer bad luck to reach the verge of power just as the professional goodwill that has kept this whole show on the road for years is evaporating.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/05/junior-doctors-strike-labours-problem

Unaware?

There’s not a mention of the SNP success in settling with the Junior Doctors in Scotland. How did the Scottish Government manage it?

Not just money.

Respect:

The deal also includes a commitment to future years pay, contract and pay bargaining modernisation.

https://www.gov.scot/news/pay-deal-agreed/

Labour and respect for unions?