Junior doctors need to turn their attention back to patients

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The BMA have announced further strike action (PA)

If Tesco, power workers and the BBC can provide a seven-day service to the public, so can junior doctors. It is time for the Prime Minister to confront the dinosaur-like BMA, just as she laid down the law to the Police Federation. The BMA, along with the junior medical profession, must reform or die in the face of a fast-moving revolution in healthcare services which is unstoppable.

The seven-day NHS is not a pipedream, it is already here, up and running in local trials. The bad news for the placard wavers in designer scarves is that it works. There is no excuse for cancelling thousands of patient appointments or, yet again, placing the onus on hard-working consultants and nurses.

It is time for Hunt and May to consider a nuclear option for the BMA. They must weigh up whether to de-recognise it as the monopoly broker for physicians, unless its members are prepared to adopt a more flexible approach. Alternatively, if it cannot reform and stop its cruelty to patients, the BMA must ultimately face abolition.

Its current position is unreasonable, untenable and a scar on the reputation of what is meant to be the peak of professionalism, not a bastion of 1970s-style militant Marxism.

Anthony Rodriguez
Staines Upon Thames

I am married to a nurse and hugely supportive of the medical profession. I fear, however, that the junior doctors will suffer Brexit-type buyers' remorse over this strike. The demand for more generous weekend pay is particularly hard to take.

I overheard in a bus queue recently: “My daughter is a carer. She works just as hard as them, and at weekends, but doesn't earn a quarter of what they do. They should get real.” And perhaps they should have accepted the deal their negotiators struck, which seems pretty reasonable to many of us.

Bill Jones
Gomersal

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The BBC cannot justify licence fees for iPlayer

Thanks to a misguided Government, anyone watching via BBC iPlayer must now buy a TV licence or face a fine. Apparently, this change is supposed to help the corporation plug an alleged £283m hole in its finances “caused by licence-fee evasion”.

Talk about having your cake and eating it. The same Government seems blind to the very obvious fact that the BBC, and the BBC alone, has enjoyed an absolute bonanza (from millions of “extra” licence fees resulting from mass net immigration over the past 30 years or so). However, the love-in between Government and BBC goes on.

Those additional millions of pounds from licence fees should really go to the NHS, GP practices, and all the other social services that have been brought to their knees – but, sadly, our politicians do not see it (or turn a blind eye).

P J Ashman
Barnsley

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What happened to keeping Scotland in the Brexit loop?

I was struck by Prime Minister May’s comment that it is the Conservative Government alone who will decide the terms of the UK’s exit and when to begin negotiations with Brussels.

This is very peculiar, as after she visited First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in mid-July, she said that she would not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until she had an “agreed UK approach”, with the agreement of all the devolved administrations.

She also said at that point that she was “willing to listen to options” on Scotland’s future relationship with the EU. Indeed, two days before May’s visit Scottish Secretary, David Mundell, said that “We want to place Scotland, the Scottish Government, right at the heart of those negotiations”.

Fast forward less than two months and despite these assurances and Scotland voting to remain in the EU, Scottish Ministers are to be frozen out of these exit talks and the option of a “soft” Brexit has been taken off the table.

There is not even a hint of shame from the Conservative UK Government as it now pledges to decide the exit terms itself, despite recent assurances to the contrary.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

Farmers need to come to terms with their problems – and stop blaming badgers

What an absolutely appalling situation, when a government can ignore all the evidence to not do something, but still go ahead and do it anyway. I refer to the culling of yet more badgers. There is not one bit of evidence for culling this beautiful animal. The cruelty is incomprehensible and is happening for no reason other than – well that’s what we’re going to do!

Those that are in Government are so full of their own importance that they are choose not to read the facts that culling will have no impact on halting bovine TB. As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, it will actually make matters worse. It’s the farmers that need to put their house in order. But they know that and choose to ignore it.

Our wildlife under this Conservative Government is utterly at continuous threat. As I write the cubbing slaughter starts, followed by fox hunting. Laws might be in place against fox hunting, but even with absolute evidence of it still happening, the police and the CPS choose to do nothing.

I find it astounding that supposedly intelligent human beings, put in positions of authority and trust, can ignore truckloads of confirmation, data, facts and statistics, from knowledgeable people who know what they are talking about, and run roughshod over them, and authorise slaughter for no other reason than – well that’s what we are going to do.

God help those poor animals.

Margaret Barnicle
Holmer Green

Brexit Britain

No Commons approval? Brexit means Brexit means Theresa Mayhem.

Patrick Cosgrove
Bucknell