Pain for doctors

The British Medical Association (BMA) claims it has no choice but to take “industrial action” to support its members’ pensions and that patients will not suffer, while ignoring certain facts.

First, GPs are not National Health Service employees; they are independent private contractors, and their inclusion at all in the NHS pension scheme is an anomalous privilege which many feel should never have been granted.

Second, they ignore the large pay increases given by the last government, with UK doctors now paid more than those in France, Netherlands or Germany (are their medical services poorer than ours?) and higher than anywhere worldwide except the United States.

Third, the 2008 reforms, despite now giving a positive cashflow of £2 billion per annum, disguise the fact that NHS pensions remain a very generous Ponzi scheme, with current contributions paying current pensions, rather than building a true pension fund from which to pay future liabilities (as almost all other private contractors and industrial firms now have to do).

Such cashflows are by no means “affordable and sustainable” for the next 45 years of new doctors’ careers or the next 70 years of their lifetimes.

Fourth, they seem to expect plaudits that “doctors have not taken action for more than 35 years”.

What other profession would adopt such an attitude?

Fifth, they boast that in 2008 they also agreed to an increase in the normal retirement age to 65! Most industry has always retired at 65, and (yes, partly due to medical advances) demography mandates this will have to increase still further in the next few decades.

Finally, while I disagree profoundly with the BMA, no tears will be shed for MPs or MSPs whose pensions are even more platinum-plated, who thereby lost the moral authority to demand reductions in others’, and who have botched the long-overdue reform of all pension schemes, public and private.

John Birkett

Horseleys Park

St Andrews