A sick joke

GOVERNMENT talks with junior doctors’ union chiefs look futile while the British Medical Association will not budge on its unrealistic 35 per cent pay claim.

But, if there’s any argument for Health Secretary Steve Barclay meeting them, it’s that he should tell them face-to-face that their demands are ludicrous.

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Then perhaps meaningful negotiations can take place.

All the time that the pie-in-the-sky figures remain talked about, a minority of nurses will think that, by holding the Government to ransom, they too can get close to the absurd pay increase demanded by their medical colleagues.

Why else did they reject an offer praised by their own union last month and accepted by Unison members?

The Royal College of Nursing boss Pat Cullen has had to make an embarrassing U-turn and say the concessions she previously claimed to have extracted from the Government suddenly aren’t enough.

The next 48-hour nurses’ walkout will include A&E, intensive care and cancer wards, she says, and she also refuses to rule out the possibility of nurses striking at the same time as junior doctors.

Such action would be disastrous for the NHS, and seriously damage the reputation of the RCN.

Woman trouble

KEIR Starmer’s hypocrisy is staggering.

First the Labour leader sanctioned a personal attack on Rishi Sunak’s record on jailing paedophiles when Starmer himself, as a former Director of Public Prosecutions, sat on the sentencing committee which recommended not all child abusers should be behind bars.

Now the latest Labour ads will try to attack the PM for his handling of women’s issues — this from a party whose leader can’t even say what a woman is.

Voters might want to look at Labour MP Rosie Duffield — bombarded with misogynistic abuse from her own side when she dared to argue for women’s right to have single-sex spaces, such as changing rooms — to see how supportive Starmer’s party is of women.

At the time she compared being in Labour to an abusive relationship.

It’s a bit rich, then, for Starmer to claim his Tory rival is the one with the poor record.

Pull the other one

LONDON mayor Sadiq Khan attempts to justify fleecing hard-pressed motorists with an expanded Ultra Low Emissions Zone by claiming that improving air quality will save men from going impotent.

Yet he also says that nine out of ten vehicles are already Ulez-compliant.

So his claim to be reducing car emissions in order to increase men’s, er, emissions doesn’t stand up.