Queen Mary University, London and its Christmas Scrooge tale

Even Scrooge would marvel at Queen Mary’s pay-docking over a marking boycott. No wonder higher education is in turmoil writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Fri 22 Dec 2023 06.00 GMT

In this season of quizzing, here’s a real head-scratcher. Can you name the big British employer that punished staff for boycotting a small fraction of their work by taking all of their pay for each day of their boycott? So that even while employees did their other tasks, putting in weeks of work, their pay packets were pilfered, month after month, from high summer until almost the start of advent. Some had to take extra jobs, others drew on hardship funds or stuck essential bills on credit cards. Amid a cost of living crisis and with Christmas looming, the Great Wage Robbery carried on. But who was responsible?

Perhaps your imagination has entered some grim distribution hangar, or is hovering above a building site. Or maybe you’re thinking of a care home bullying its migrant workers who are fuzzy on their rights and scared of speaking up. You’re seeing ruthless, rapacious big-C Capital opening its giant, bloody maw wide to chew on some low-paid and underqualified labour. Right?

Wrong. Try a charity. To be precise, that branch of charitable enterprise we call a Russell Group university. This is the story of Queen Mary University of London, whose boss, Colin Bailey, is on a package worth £359,000 a year (plus free housing in inner London) , but which bilks its own academics as brazenly as Scrooge did his clerks. If you want a closeup of the turmoil engulfing higher education, or to see how some of our most prestigious white-collar jobs have been so vastly degraded, this is a story for you. Because even Ebenezer would have marvelled at the goings-on at Queen Mary.

This spring, its academics joined a national union boycott of marking exams to protest against the low pay awards that have seen university lecturers’ salaries fall 25% behind inflation since the banking crash, and their deteriorating working conditions. By downing their red pens, tutors were hitting universities where it hurt most – since they rely on student fees. But they kept up the other parts of the academic job: guiding students, doing research and writing papers. That did not pacify the bosses, who decreed that those withholding their marks would lose up to 113 days of pay – one for each day of their boycott.

A similar standoff took place last year, when staff received payslips with a net payment of £0.00. So as not to repeat that furore, the university instead deducted about 21 days from each month’s paycheck. In July, it confiscated almost £176,000 from 82 staff – on average more than £2,000 each.

Even after the University and College Union (UCU) called off the boycott in September and the academics scrambled to give students their marks, their pay kept on getting docked for days they had boycotted. For some, December is their first month on full pay since the start of summer.

What’s it like to open your payslip and find two-thirds of it has disappeared? Even as staff told me, many worried about reprisals from managers. So here is an anonymised sample of their stories:

 A woman whose manager knew she was three months pregnant was told at the end of June that her very next paycheck would be docked. The pregnancy was already judged high risk, and she had to support her 4-year-old child and husband. In July, she duly lost £2,147.

 A man had to take a second job to ensure he could pay his mortgage and his child’s nursery at Queen Mary. He paid his own employer nursery fees, despite it withholding pay for him.

 To look after his sick mum and elderly dad, another man worked a second job.

 A woman relied on her friends letting her stay with them for months. If she had had to pay rent on her reduced salary, she said, “I simply could not have managed.”

These are senior lecturers, responsible for teaching the next generation of teachers, lawyers and doctors while doing research that will help all of us. And they have been treated like dirt.

Listening to all this, I kept hearing another voice – the clipped, precise tones of BBC Radio 4’s Justin Webb. As he and his fellow Today presenters have had to interview medics, barristers and professors about exactly why they’re on a chilly picket line, there is a distinct puzzlement audible in their questions. Disgruntled factory workers they can understand, but aren’t these meant to be the good jobs?

That’s what those academics also believed, once. Two of the stories you’ve just read came from people who were the first in their family to go to university. They studied hard and overworked, and they lived out the Blairite boast that “we’re all middle class now” – only to find that middle-class jobs are not what they were. They have become more routine, more spied upon (Queen Mary managers encouraged students to submit reports, inevitably nicknamed “snitch forms” , on their own teachers) and relatively worse paid. Yet the facade of tweedy collegiality never drops. As staff log in to the university that took their pay, they are reminded that Queen Mary is “committed to improving social justice”.

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Other universities deducted pay for marking boycotts. At Aberdeen, the principal said he wanted to inflict “pain” on dissenting lecturers. But few administrations have been as punitive as Queen Mary’s. Other universities may claim to be in budgetary crisis, from Oxford Brookes to Sheffield Hallam. Not Queen Mary, which is sitting on an annual surplus of £92m. Even so, its boss still threatened a degree programmewith closure after its staff stuck up for their rights. No wonder last year it was crowned “worst university employer in the UK”. In surveys, academics frequently pick out their own bosses as the worst aspect of the entire college. “Senior management does not listen to staff and does not even attempt to show that it is doing so,” is one typical example.

I put these allegations in detail to Queen Mary’s principal and to members of its governing council, along with other questions to get their perspective. Rather than answer directly, the press office issued a short statement that read in part: “We do not withhold pay from staff so long as they deliver all their educational activities. Teaching and assessment are priority contractual activities for university staff, and we withhold pay for staff who do not carry out these core activities due to industrial action.”

You help to pay for this regime. Because charities are meant to serve a benefit to the public and work to higher ends, they are not liable for the same taxes as other businesses. Universities are not overseen by the Charity Commission but by the Office for Students, which has no expertise in charitable regulation. If they did, harder questions might be asked about what is happening inside today’s degree factories.

In the meantime, Queen Mary’s status as a charity means it charges no VAT on its fees or halls of residence and pays no corporation tax on its surplus. A conservative estimate from the local University and College Union puts this public subsidy as worth more than £100m a year.

“Out upon merry Christmas!” grumps Scrooge. “If I could work my will every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” Someone should nominate Ebenezer to run a British university.

The Economics Lesson Taught by the Covid Pandemic

 

Populism is the result of global economic failure

Larry Elliott in The Guardian


The rise of populism has rattled the global political establishment. Brexit came as a shock, as did the victory of Donald Trump. Much head-scratching has resulted as leaders seek to work out why large chunks of their electorates are so cross.

The answer seems pretty simple. Populism is the result of economic failure. The 10 years since the financial crisis have shown that the system of economic governance that has held sway for the past four decades is broken. Some call this approach neoliberalism. Perhaps a better description would be unpopulism.

Unpopulism meant tilting the balance of power in the workplace in favour of management and treating people like wage slaves. Unpopulism was rigged to ensure that the fruits of growth went to the few not to the many. Unpopulism decreed that those responsible for the global financial crisis got away with it while those who were innocent bore the brunt of austerity.
Anybody seeking to understand why Trump won the US presidential election should take a look at what has been happening to the division of the economic spoils. The share of national income that went to the bottom 90% of the population held steady at around 66% from 1950 to 1980. It then began a steep decline, falling to just over 50% when the financial crisis broke in 2007.

Similarly, it is no longer the case that everybody benefits when the US economy is doing well. During the business cycle upswing between 1961 and 1969, the bottom 90% of Americans took 67% of the income gains. During the Reagan expansion two decades later they took 20%. During the Greenspan housing bubble of 2001 to 2007, they got just two cents in every extra dollar of national income generated while the richest 10% took the rest.


Those responsible for global financial crisis got away with it while those who were innocent bore the brunt of austerity

The US economist Thomas Palley* says that up until the late 1970s countries operated a virtuous circle growth model in which wages were the engine of demand growth.

“Productivity growth drove wage growth which fueled demand growth. That promoted full employment which provided the incentive to invest, which drove further productivity growth,” he says.

Unpopulism was touted as the antidote to the supposedly-failed policies of the post-war era. It promised higher growth rates, higher investment rates, higher productivity rates and a trickle down of income from rich to poor. It has delivered none of these things.

James Montier and Philip Pilkington of the global investment firm GMO say that the system that arose in the 1970s was characterised by four significant economic policies: the abandonment of full employment and its replacement with inflation targeting; an increase in the globalisation of the flows of people, capital and trade; a focus on shareholder maximisation rather than reinvestment and growth; and the pursuit of flexible labour markets and the disruption of trade unions and workers’ organisations.

To take just the last of these four pillars, the idea was that trade unions and minimum wages were impediments to an efficient labour market. Collective bargaining and statutory pay floors would result in workers being paid more than the market rate, with the result that unemployment would inevitably rise.

Unpopulism decreed that the real value of the US minimum wage should be eroded. But unemployment is higher than it was when the minimum wage was worth more. Nor is there any correlation between trade union membership and unemployment. If anything, international comparisons suggest that those countries with higher trade union density have lower jobless rates. The countries that have higher minimum wages do not have higher unemployment rates.

“Labour market flexibility may sound appealing, but it is based on a theory that runs completely counter to all the evidence we have,” Montier and Pilkington note. “The alternative theory suggests that labour market flexibility is by no means desirable as it results in an economy with a bias to stagnate that can only maintain high rates of employment and economic growth through debt-fuelled bubbles that inevitably blow up, leading to the economy tipping back into stagnation.”

This quest for ever-greater labour-market flexibility has had some unexpected consequences. The bill in the UK for tax credits spiralled quickly once firms realised that they could pay poverty wages and let the state pick up the bill. Access to a global pool of low-cost labour meant there was less of an incentive to invest in productivity-enhancing equipment.

The abysmally-low levels of productivity growth since the crisis have encouraged the belief that this is a recent phenomenon, but as Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, noted last week, the trend started in most advanced countries in the 1970s.

“Certainly, the productivity puzzle is not something which has emerged since the global financial crisis, though it seems to have amplified pre-existing trends,” Haldane said.


Bolshie trade unions certainly can’t be blamed for Britain’s lost productivity decade. The orthodox view in the 1970s was that attempts to make the UK more efficient were being thwarted by shop stewards who modeled themselves on Fred Kite, the character played by Peter Sellers in I’m Alright Jack. Haldane puts the blame elsewhere: on poor management, which has left the UK with a big gap between frontier firms and a long tail of laggards. “Firms which export have systematically higher levels of productivity than domestically-oriented firms, on average by around a third. The same is true, even more dramatically, for foreign-owned firms. Their average productivity is twice that of domestically-oriented firms.”

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Populism is seen as irrational and reprehensible. It is neither. It seems entirely rational for the bottom 90% of the US population to question why they are getting only 2% of income gains. It hardly seems strange that workers in Britain should complain at the weakest decade for real wage growth since the Napoleonic wars.

It has also become clear that ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing are merely sticking-plaster solutions. Populism stems from a sense that the economic system is not working, which it clearly isn’t. In any other walk of life, a failed experiment results in change. Drugs that are supposed to provide miracle cures but are proved not to work are quickly abandoned. Businesses that insist on continuing to produce goods that consumers don’t like go bust. That’s how progress happens.

The good news is that the casting around for new ideas has begun. Trump has advocated protectionism. Theresa May is consulting on an industrial strategy. Montier and Pilkington suggest a commitment to full employment, job guarantees, re-industrialisation and a stronger role for trade unions. The bad news is that time is running short. More and more people are noticing that the emperor has no clothes.

Even if the polls are right this time and Marine Le Pen fails to win the French presidency, a full-scale political revolt is only another deep recession away. And that’s easy enough to envisage.

In Brexit Britain there will be no benefit caps for the multinationals

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


Take back control. Those three words now govern our politics. They sum up why Britain is leaving Europe, and they make up the yardstick by which Theresa May will be judged. Yet already, in the past few days, their hollowness has been exposed.

This story moves fast – and begins with a threat. Not a subtle moue of displeasure from behind an expensive pair of cufflinks, but a bluntly put, publicly issued ransom. At the end of September the boss of Nissan, Carlos Ghosn, goes to one of the car industry’s biggest annual events, the Paris Motor Show, and declares to reporters that Brexit means the UK now has to cut him “a deal”. If cars made in Britain are to face tariffs on export to Europe, he wants “some kind of compensation”.

Extraordinary: one of the biggest manufacturers in Britain effectively wants danger money to carry on investing here. Even more remarkably, Nissan has behind it the full might of the Japanese government, which sent 15 pages of demands on behalf of some of the country’s biggest businesses – along with the veiled threat to pull out of the UK.

Faster than you can say Micra, Ghosn is invited to Downing Street. Within two weeks he has a face-to-face with the prime minister. The UK has just opted to sever four decades of relations with its biggest trading partner, the government has no fiscal policy and her own party is in turmoil – yet May still clears her diary for the Nissan boss.

Then, a few days back, Ghosn announces Sunderland will not only carry on working, but will now make the new-model Qashqai. The obvious question is: what did his company get from our government? Yet business secretary Greg Clark refuses to divulge any detail of how much or even what kind of taxpayer support has been offered to Nissan – after all, it’s only our money. Instead, he waves off the deal as just a slightly prickly chat in the senior common room.

“One can overcomplicate these things,” he airily tells MPs at the end of October. A mere month after Ghosn made his initial threat, what apparently changed his mind was the government’s “intention to find common ground and to pursue discussions in a rational and civilised way”.

To say this doesn’t add up is beside the point: it’s not meant to. Clark and May obviously don’t want a rival carmaker or any other multinational operating in Britain to know how far they will go to keep them onshore. But if the multimillionaire boss of a £33bn auto giant only wanted a “rational and civilised” discussion, , he could try a Melvyn Bragg podcast. The Qashqai has been a massive seller for Nissan; the company would not have opted to make the next model out of Sunderland merely on the basis of some comforting ministerial purrs.

A source tells Reuters that “the government gave Nissan a written commitment of extra support in the event Brexit reduces its competitiveness”. The carmaker itself acknowledges that its executive committee made its decision upon receiving the “support and assurances of the UK government”. And the former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, warns that such deals could cost the taxpayer “colossal amounts of money”. How much? Were the EU to slap on 10% extra on British-made cars, the tariff bill for Nissan UK alone would come to just shy of £300m a year. If May and Clark were to try to cover half of that, they would be extending an unprecedented level of subsidy to just one company. Now imagine those same terms replicated for the other big car exporters: Toyota (which before the referendum warned of cutbacks if Britain left the EU), Honda, Jaguar Land Rover …

What you’ve just seen, then, is a foretaste of the way big business will deal with the government in Brexit Britain. First the threat, then the bargain, and finally, with unministerial haste, an expensive handshake behind closed doors. Each time, the public will be none the wiser, even as their government commits them to perhaps costly support for some company or sector, each one claiming strategic importance. And don’t think it will stop at cars.
Within 48 hours of the Brexit vote, the National Farmers’ Union was preparing for an extraordinary meeting of its council to draw up demands for Downing Street. Top of the list was the £2.4bn in subsidies that farmers get each year from Brussels. Within weeks, the new chancellor Philip Hammond was promising to carry on the handouts until the end of this decade. He made similar offers to universities and businesses reliant on EU grants.


Almost inevitably, the British state becomes even more of a milch-cow for big businesses

Put these numbers in context. Starting this week, the government will cut the benefits it gives to 88,000 families. That is huge turmoil – and it will cut just £100m from the welfare bill. Yet at the same time, billions are being committed to keep sweet businesses from the pharmaceutical giants to the landowners of the south-west.

These are businesses that have already done very well out of taxpayers. Consider Nissan UK: Kevin Farnsworth, lecturer in social policy at the University of York and an expert on government subsidies, calculates that over the past two decades it has taken £782m in loans, grants and handouts from the British and European public. In upfront cash transfers alone that comes to £130m.

Farnsworth has calculated this figure by combing Nissan accounts as well as the grant documents from the British government and its various agencies. He has compiled a database for other major businesses, to be found at corporate-welfare-watch.org.uk.

Where this takes you is to the dirty secret of the British business model. From Margaret Thatcher onwards, successive governments have lured multinational investors by promising them access to the single market, a cheap, biddable workforce and a bunch of corporate sweeteners. It was the same offer Dublin made to the tax avoiders of Silicon Valley and – within its own narrow confines – it worked. As Farnsworth points out, Britain has reliably taken in proportionately more foreign direct investment than most of its competitors.

The problem is that now the UK can no longer guarantee access to 500 million European consumers, it will need to make its workers cheaper and even more flexible and offer more handouts.

Surveying this debacle, it strikes me that Lord Acton got it wrong. It’s not power that corrupts; it’s powerlessness. What do you bargain with, when three decades of deregulation and weakening of local and central government mean you have hardly any cards left in your hand? Almost inevitably, the British state becomes even more of a milch-cow for big businesses. Forget about foreigners coming over here and taking our benefits; now think about multinationals cherry-picking our benefits. That trade-off isn’t rhetorical: it’s real. That money will come from our social security, our hospitals, our schools. Brexit Britain: a soft touch for corporate welfare. Is this what was meant by control?

‘I can’t sacrifice my family for the NHS’: the junior doctors forced out of jobs they love

Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian

At what point does a dedicated doctor, with a lifelong commitment to the NHS, decide it is time to quit? For Dr Singh, 34, a junior doctor in general medicine, the moment will come when he is no longer able to pay his mortgage and childcare bills, a situation he expects to find himself facing sometime next year.

Dr Singh has worked in hospitals, with regular A&E shifts, for 10 years since qualifying, loves his job and describes himself as “the kind of doctor you’d want to see to your gran”. But, having done an online calculation assessing how the Department of Health’s new junior doctor contract will affect his household income, he believes he and his paediatrician wife face a 25% cut to their joint take-home pay, making life in London unaffordable. He plans to move into the pharmaceutical industry.

New junior doctors' contract changes everything I signed up for

Several of Dr Singh’s friends have already left the medical profession to work as bankers and consultants in the City; others are considering emigrating to work as doctors in Australia or New Zealand. Most of them are dispirited by the proposed contract, but are more fed up with the daily stress of their work, annoyed that the long hours and considerable financial and personal sacrifices they make during their training are not appreciated, and they worry about the impact that dwindling morale could have on the NHS and its patients.

“I am not looking for parity of pay with my friends in the City. But if you can’t afford to pay your mortgage or your child’s nursery bills and you can’t look after your child yourself in the evening or [at] the weekend because the government is proposing you should work those hours on a normal basis, you can’t continue with that kind of life,” he says, asking for his full name not to be published to avoid annoying his employers. “I am a very valuable resource to the NHS. I do work incredibly hard, I really enjoy looking after my patients and I get immense satisfaction from it. I have an absolute commitment to the NHS but I can’t sacrifice my entire family for that. I have to put a roof over my son’s head.”

Junior doctors will be balloted to decide whether to strike over a radical new contract imposed on them by the Department of Health, which redefines their normal working week to include Saturday and removes overtime rates for work between 7pm and 10pm every day except Sunday. The government says the changes will come with a rise in basic salary, higher hourly rates for antisocial hours and will be “cost neutral” – but doctors believe this change could reduce salaries in some areas of medicine by up to 30%. The British Medical Association (BMA) argues that it is “unacceptable that working 9pm on a Saturday is viewed the same as working 9am on a Tuesday”.

It is unusual to hear doctors getting angry and this swell of rage is disconcerting. A social media campaign means their voices have begun to be widely heard over the past week. If the effects of the government’s austerity drive on care workers, for example, have gone largely unnoticed, the seething protest from this powerful group looks set to be harder to ignore.

Most junior doctors are smart enough to know that they will have to work hard to persuade the public that they are a genuinely needy section of society. A perception of doctors as well-paid professionals has stuck and even a semi-attentive observer knows that the harsh 100-hour-week working pattern that used to characterise medical training has been abolished.

What most people outside the medical profession are probably unaware of is that you aren’t just a junior doctor for a fleeting period after qualifying; this makes up a substantial chunk of your career – sometimes a decade, and often stretching late into your 30s. Basic salaries start at around £23,000 and are enhanced by various complicated supplements, including the antisocial hours pay that is set to be cut. Because medical training takes longer than other degrees, most junior doctors have large amounts of student debt and are expected to continue paying for the exams as part of their ongoing training, in addition to putting in large amounts of unpaid study time and paying out monthly professional payments to the General Medical Council (GMC) and the BMA.

Few people chose to go into medicine for the money, but this contract has triggered a surge of resentment about how much harder doctors work for less money than their equally ambitious and well-educated peers in other fields.
  Radiologist Anushka Patchava says she will have to quit the profession if the proposals are implemented. Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Guardian

Anushka Patchava, 29, a radiologist who qualified in 2011 and has at least two more years as a junior doctor before she graduates to being a consultant, plans to switch careers and is midway through a rigorous interviewing process with two management consultancy firms. She is fed up with the hours and the current pay and is despondent at the prospect of getting a substantial cut to her salary. She earns £31,000, which includes a 40% supplement to her basic salary, to compensate for the antisocial hours she works. Once the new contract is imposed, she thinks she will see this reduced to £27,000 or £28,000 and she expects the hours she works will become even more antisocial. She campaigned for David Cameron in May’s general election, but has subsequently rescinded her membership of the Conservative party in protest at the contract.

If she gets the management consultancy job, Patchava will quadruple her salary on day one. “It’s horrific, isn’t it?” she says. She doesn’t consider herself to be materialistic and, in normal circumstances, would not want to leave a job she loves, but the level of needless daily stress has become wearisome and she is constantly aware of lack of morale among her colleagues.

“Going into work is a struggle – you have to psych yourself up. You’re so short staffed that you can’t offer patients everything you want to offer them. There aren’t enough doctors to fill the posts that there are available now, even before the contract is brought in,” she says. “We are not supported and morale is low. You work really long hours, taking decisions that impact on people’s lives and, at the same time, you’re worrying whether your pay check is going to be enough to cover your bills.”

The daughter of two NHS surgeons, Patchava has an deep-rooted sense of loyalty to the NHS, but her parents understand the pressure she is under and why she wants to leave. There are no perks; she has to buy expensive food and coffee from the hospital cafe and pays £12 every night shift to park in the hospital car park. She calculates that, once the long hours are factored in, she earns about £10 an hour, so these costs are not negligible. As junior doctors, her parents used to get free food and free accommodation. Four of her closest friends from Cambridge, where she studied medicine, have already left to work in the City. “One of them got a gold medal in medicine, for being top of the year, but they dropped out for exactly these reasons.”

These are not alarmist stories being spread by campaigners. Even the Conservative MP and doctor Sarah Wollaston, who chairs the Health Select Committee, knows about the brain drain – her daughter has left the NHS for Australia. Now she, her husband and eight of their friends work in a hospital where they have yet to meet an Australian junior doctor in the casualty department. “It is staffed almost entirely by British-trained junior doctors,”Wollaston wrote this week.

Patchava worries about what will happen when she wants to have children and has to organise childcare for the irregular hours. Another aspect of the new contract is that parents who take time off to look after their children will no longer see their pay rise automatically while they are on leave. People who take time out of the medical training system to do research will be similarly penalised. Other changes include the removal of a supplement paid to those going into general practice, to match those working in hospitals, which doctors believe could see trainee GPs losing a third of their pay.

“I don’t have a luxury lifestyle, but I don’t think I could support children with that money and those hours,” Patchava says. “The NHS runs on the philosophy of altruism. Everyone comes in an hour early and stays late to make sure the work is done. We love the NHS, but this has been such a kick in the teeth. I’ll have no hesitation about taking a job elsewhere.”

This sense of mismatch between the commitment put in and reward taken out is widespread. “I’m 30 years old, live in a friend’s flat with three other people, don’t own a car and have still got thousands of pounds of debt,” writes one junior doctor in an angry email. “My friends outside of medicine have bought houses, have children and the majority have their weekends and evenings for themselves. On top of my ‘48 hours a week’, I teach and lecture in my free time, attend courses (which we have to fund), study and do everything I can to be a better doctor. I love my job – I couldn’t imagine living with myself if I left. However, the prevalence of locums and holes in the rota, overstretched stressed GPs and A&E staff make the atmosphere toxic. We miss weddings, funerals, birthdays. Relationships are lost, friends estranged, all because we love our job.”

Foiz Ahmed, a junior doctor in emergency plastic surgery (who is grappling with £30,000 debt) argues that the new contracts will strike a pernicious blow to the NHS and patient safety. “This isn’t just about salaries, although of course a 10-30% pay cut is unmanageable for most of us. Let’s ignore the fact that I used to earn more an hour while working for a mobile-phone company as a student ... With the continued denigration of public perception of doctors, there is a sustained attempt to make the NHS fail. A demoralised workforce performs less efficiently, and a less-efficient system can be broken up and sold to private firms.”

The Department of Heath insists these fears are misplaced. “We are not cutting the pay bill for junior doctors and want to see their basic pay go up just as average earnings are maintained. We really value the work and commitment of junior doctors, but their current contract is outdated and unfair.”

Junior doctors are not convinced. The GMC had 3,468 requests for a certificate of current professional status, the paperwork needed to register to work as a doctor outside the UK, in the 10 days since the new contract was announced; usually it processes 20 to 25 requests a day. Partly this was the result of a concerted online campaign to get junior doctors to apply as a way of showing their anger. But some doctors, such as David Watkin, 30, a paediatrician based in Birmingham, truly intend to leave if the contract is imposed. Watkin recently returned from a year working in New Zealand, has stayed in touch with his employers out there and is confident that there will be a job for him.

The day-to-day stress Watkin experiences in Birmingham, which is mainly the result of standing in for unfilled doctors’ shifts, was absent in New Zealand. “But stress is not really the issue,” he says. In New Zealand, he says he felt more looked after, with meals paid for and professional fees covered by the hospital.

Would I be a fool to return to the NHS on the new junior doctor contract?



“Here we feel very under-appreciated by the government and the Department of Health. We have sacrificed a lot – years of training and extra hours studying outside of our work. We have moved around the country every six months to go where our training jobs send us, with no say in where we go, so it’s difficult to settle anywhere and hard to buy a house. We, as a body, are feeling under attack; it feels like any concerns we raise are being misrepresented with hospitals portraying us as just wanting more money.”

At 30, he still has about £9,000 in debt (down from about £30,000). He has done seven years as a junior doctor already and has another four to go before he becomes a consultant. “I worry that this is going to lead to an exodus of doctors, and I worry about the pressure that this will put on those who stay – and on patients. I had a work-experience student with me this week; it feels harder to come out with a positive line about why they should do it.”

  Holly Ni Raghallaigh: ‘I worked very hard and put myself in a lot of debt to get here.’ Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Guardian

Holly Ni Raghallaigh, 29, a trainee urologist, is planning to go to Scotland (which, like Wales, will not impose the new contract). She has been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by the cost of her training, and doesn’t feel able to take a pay cut. With five more years as a junior doctor, she doesn’t think she could afford to continue if her pay is reduced.

“I worked very hard and put myself in a lot of debt to get here,” she says. At one point she had to pay for a urology course ahead of an exam and was so overdrawn that she missed two consecutive monthly payments to the GMC, was temporarily removed from the medical register and subjected to a large fine. She estimates she has spent £5,000 on mandatory surgery courses and exams during surgical training; she is paying back her remaining £10,000 of student loan at a rate of £450 a month. Once her rent in London and her monthly subscriptions to the Royal College of Surgeons (£50), GMC (£40) and BMA (£18) are paid, she has nothing left. It isn’t possible to save towards a deposit on a flat.

“Every single time I found myself in my overdraft or having to borrow petrol money or forego a flight home to Ireland to book a course, or every weekend I spent working as a locum to fund my education – I would do it all over again,” she says. “I adore my job and, honestly, working in the NHS is all I have ever wanted to do. And, for the record, I am grateful to the taxpayer who has put me here.” She says she hopes the tales of difficulties she found “embarrassing and demoralising” make people understand the financial pressures junior doctors face. “I don’t want it to sound like a sob story. I could have managed my finances better, but I had no money.”

Abracadabra! Britain’s political elite has fooled us all again

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Magicians call it misdirection: directing the attention of a crowd elsewhere so as to distract from the trick happening right in front of it. A bump on the shoulder, a blur of handwaving and – wham! – your wallet’s taken leave of your hip pocket.

Since the crash, British politics has been one epic act of misdirection. Lay off those bankers who shoved the country into penury! Just focus on stripping disabled people of their benefits. Never mind the millionaire bosses squeezing your pay! Spit instead at the minimum-wage migrant cleaners apparently making us poorer. So ingrained is the ritual that when a minister strides into view urging the need for “a grown-up debate”, we brace ourselves for another round of Blame the Victim. The only question is who gets sacrificed next: some ethnic minority, this family on low pay, that middle-aged dad who can’t get a job.

Here is how political misdirection works in real time. Yesterday, Unite’s Len McCluskey came under a barrage of criticism for suggesting that Labour live up to its name and support “ordinary working people”. Evil paymaster! Meanwhile, on the front page of this paper, digger firm JCB called on David Cameron to prepare to take Britain out of the EU – and this was just a company having its say.

JCB boss says EU exit could lift burden of bureaucracy on UK businesses

 

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I hold no brief for McCluskey – but he is the democratically elected head of a trade union simply seeking to influence the party part-funded by his members. Perhaps this comes as news to some on Fleet Street, but the debate over Labour’s future is not the chew-toy solely of newspaper columnists. Moreover, Unite’s donations to Her Majesty’s Opposition are a matter of easily checkable record. Not so the money poured into Tory coffers by JCB, either as a business or from its owners, the Bamford family. To learn that, we must rely upon forensic researchers such as Stuart Wilks-Heeg at Liverpool University. He calculated this morning that, between 2001-14, the Bamfords and JCB had together given the Conservatives at least £6.7m. One arm of JCB also donated £600,000 last year to Tory campaigns in key marginals, including the all-important battleground of Nuneaton.

So a company that funded David Cameron all the way into Downing Street, and whose chairman was recently made a lord, seeks to influence the government on one of the most fundamental issues in British politics, something that affects all of us – and this is business as usual. Yet a workers’ elected representative adding his voice to the din of an internal party argument somehow represents the biggest political landgrab since a bloke with a goatee popped in to the Winter Palace.

Expect more of this misdirection over the next few weeks. Labour has scheduled the entire summer for its leadership campaign, which could equal months of an entire party sounding like an indecisive satnav: Veer right! Keep left! Meanwhile, in just over a month, George Osborne will lay out an emergency budget to deal with the enormous £90bn deficit that he inherited from himself. Using the traditional lexicon of political hocus-pocus – “hard choices” – he will begin making some of the extra £12bn of welfare cuts the Tories pledged at the last election.

Every feat of misdirection is always intended to distract the audience from a sleight of hand. The same goes in politics – only here it’s aimed at taking our minds off the fact that all this jiggery-pokery is actually making us worse off. Let me show you what I mean, using figures calculated for the Guardian by academics at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc), using official data. When Thatcher moved into No 10, 28% of all working age households took more from the state in cash benefits, in health and education and all the rest of it than they paid back in taxes. In other words, more than one in four employers in Britain were failing to pay their staff’s way.

The next round of cuts will hit the working poor all over again, like a hammer to the face

More than three decades later, through Major and Blair and Brown and Cameron, that proportion has kept on rising. Now 38% of working-age households rely on taxpayers to pay their way. Think about all those tax credits for low-paid work, those exemptions for people earning too little even to be taxed. We have more people in work than ever before – and more households than ever before relying on the state to keep them afloat.

There’s nothing wrong with these people. These are the hard-working families politicians like talking about – the strivers, the squeezed middle, the alarm-clock Britain. But there’s a lot wrong with their employers – because they now rely on taxpayers to top up poverty pay, even while insisting on cuts in corporation tax and grants for investment. Come 8 July, it won’t be those businesses that the chancellor tells to change their ways – it’ll be the people they employ who will see more money taken out of their weekly budget by the cuts. Because the one thing we know about the next round of cuts is that they will hit the working poor all over again, like a hammer to the face.

This is what politics looks like in Britain nowadays, once the newspapers have their japes and the politicians leave the TV studios: it is about justifying an extractive business class that wants to lean on taxpayers to pay their way, even while lecturing the rest of us about welfare dependency. And it doesn’t change all that much whether the Tories or Labour are in Downing Street. The Cresc team looked at who reaped the rewards from growth over the past three decades. Under Thatcher and Major, the top 10% of all working-age households took 29p in every £1 of income growth. Under Blair and Brown, their share actually went up, to 30p in each £1. Cresc found that New Labour bumped up the share of the poorest economically active households from 0.5% to 1.5%. Taxes and benefits evened that up a bit – the same taxes and benefits that are now deemed unaffordable. So much for trickle down.

This is what all the misdirection has been about: taking our minds off the fact that Britain is a soft touch for businesses that want taxpayers to pay their way, and politicians who count on the middle classes to feel richer, not through their wage packets, but by their house prices, their no-frills flights, their luxury buys from Lidl. What a trick has been pulled on Britain by its political and business elite: never have so many people had their pockets picked at the same time.