“Ninety per cent of those who voted in our recent ballot supported taking action, however we did not reach the arbitrary and restrictive threshold for a mandate to be granted.”
Dr Adelina McLeod, Council Member of the British Medical Association (BMA), recently spoke at the Institute of Employment Rights and Campaign for Trade Union Freedom fringe meeting in Durham, on the eve of the Miners’ Gala. You can read an edited version of the speech published below.
Good evening, everyone. And thank you, this is the BMA’s first time officially at the Durham Miners’ Gala and I would like to thank the organising committee and yourselves for the warm welcome we have been given.
I want talk today about healthcare from this single premise.
Healthcare is a human endeavour.
It depends on trust, compassion and solidarity.
Trade union laws must be enablers and protectors of this endeavour.
When the law weakens solidarity, it doesn’t just weaken workers — it weakens the relationships on which safe patient care depends.
When the Labour Government becomes openly hostile to doctors exercising their legal right to strike, we should all sit up and take notice.
My name is Adelina McLeod. I’m a consultant geriatrician in Newcastle specialising in dementia care, a field through which I see the end result of decades of poverty, health inequalities and a lack of investment in managing modifiable risk factors in the hard-to-reach populations.
I serve on the BMA UK Council, the governing and strategic body of our trade union and professional association. Our NEC.
When the miners first gathered in Durham over 150 years ago, they understood something profoundly important: no worker stands alone.
When most people think about anti-trade union laws, they think about the impacts on miners, rail workers or dockers. But those same laws quietly shape our NHS every single day.
Whether you are a miner, a nurse, a railway worker or a doctor, our strength has always come from standing together.
Yet our trade union laws too often treat solidarity as something to be restricted rather than protected.
The BMA welcomes the progress with the new Employment Rights Act.
But it is quite simply not good enough.
The delay to the implementation of online balloting and delayed removal of ballot thresholds means our members are still waiting for rights they were promised.
And those delays have had real consequences this week.
Our SAS doctor colleagues in England have been denied the industrial action that they voted for. Ninety per cent of those who voted in our recent ballot supported taking action, however we did not reach the arbitrary and restrictive threshold for a mandate to be granted.
That is a barrier Parliament has already accepted should be removed.
Yet we still wait for them to deliver too little and for us delivering it too late.
We should and do welcome progress – but we should never mistake this current act for the finish line.
Today I want to focus on two further reforms that would make a real difference – not only to doctors, but to workers across Britain.
The first is repealing the ban on secondary – or solidarity – action.
Healthcare is a clear example of why trade union law must evolve, because modern healthcare is built on interdependence.
Our NHS is increasingly fragmented. Staff caring for the same patients sometimes in the same hospital often work for different employers. Yet if one employer creates unsafe conditions, every workforce must construct its own separate legal dispute.
It is bureaucratic, inefficient and completely disconnected from the reality of modern working life.
More importantly, it leaves the most vulnerable workers isolated.
Imagine you are a young doctor who has travelled across the world to work in Britain because you believe in the NHS.
The agency employing you doesn’t just pay your wages.
It provides your accommodation.
It sponsors your visa.
It may even control your professional registration.
Challenge exploitation and you don’t simply risk losing your job – you risk losing your home, your immigration status and your career.
Employment Tribunals move slowly.
A deportation threat does not.
Those of us with secure contracts should be free to stand beside colleagues facing that kind of exploitation.
I would like to take this opportunity to commend the work of Linda Hobson and others in Unison who successfully pushed back last year against the wholesale adoption of Subcos in the NHS a policy that was to divorce the most vulnerable and low paid of our workforce from the protections of our NHS family and national contracts.
The need for solidarity has never been clearer.
And let’s be honest.
Secondary action is banned because it works.
It is banned because solidarity works.
It is banned because employers know solidarity works.
It is banned because governments know solidarity works.
Solidarity in healthcare (the country’s biggest employer) could be revolutionary for the NHS and patients.
The second reform we need is a wider definition of who and what can be the subject of a trade dispute.
Doctors increasingly answer to organisations that are not technically their employer – recruitment bodies, education organisations, Royal Colleges and NHS commissioners. They shape our working lives and our careers, yet most cannot legally be the subject of industrial action.
You may not be aware of the case of Dr Chris Day who with the good law project had to legally challenge health education England to win back whistleblower protections for 50,000 doctors.
Health Education England working on one hand like an employer who can terminate a contract yet arguing that they were not in fact an employer when it came to whistleblower protections.
Trade union law has to reflect the reality of our complex working lives, we shouldn’t have to go to court to prove employer status before we can fight for our rights.
But I suggest our ambition should not stop there.
If trade unions exist only to negotiate wages, perhaps today’s law is enough.
But if trade unions exist to improve the lives of working people, then the Employment Rights Act falls far short.
Trade unions should be free to campaign collectively on the wider issues that shape working lives—from ending the public health crisis to climate change, from championing ethical procurement so that we don’t export exploitation to addressing the growing injustice of wealth inequality.
Imagine what working people could achieve together if we were free to campaign across sectors for a fairer tax system, so that ordinary workers no longer carried a disproportionate share of funding our public services while wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of a few?
The playing field remains fundamentally uneven.
The miners understood something that remains just as relevant in today’s NHS:
An injury to one worker is an injury to us all.
Our laws should recognise that principle – not make it unlawful.
The campaign to free our unions is not simply about the freedom to withdraw our labour.
It is about the freedom to stand beside one another.
The freedom to defend those with the least power.
The freedom to challenge injustice wherever it appears.
That is what solidarity means.
That is human endeavour.
And any government that truly stands on the side of working people should have the courage to make it a reality.
Thank you.”
- This is an edited version of the speech given by Dr Adelina McLeod, Council Member of the British Medical Association (BMA), at the Institute of Employment Rights and Campaign for Trade Union Freedom fringe meeting in Durham, on the eve of the Miners’ Gala.
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