Whose motives do you trust more: junior doctors who dedicate their lives to saving the lives of others, or a Tory cabinet minister – Jeremy Hunt – who once co-authored a book calling for the denationalisation of the NHS? It is deplorable that I even have to defend the motives of those enduring antisocial working hours and less pay than other graduates, all for serving as the backbone of Britain’s most precious institution.

Yet England’s junior doctors are being subjected to a smear campaign, portrayed as venal, militant, deluded and misled – just like other striking workers before them. Polls show that so far, that campaign is failing, probably because millions of us have personal experience of junior doctors and see the chasm between how they are portrayed and reality. But there is no question: the government is determined to defeat this strike to send a very clear message – and not just to the junior doctors.

Jeremy Hunt could have stopped this doctors’ strike. But he wanted it | Polly Toynbee Read more

There isn’t a straightforward comparison between junior doctors and the miners in the 1980s. The former are middle-class professionals; the latter were the very emblem of the old industrial working class. The British Medical Association has so far not been demonised as “the enemy within”, and – tragically – the miners attracted less public sympathy at the time.

Some of the rhetoric is certainly the same. One government source briefed the BBC that the junior doctors (some of whom voted Tory last year) are trying to bring down the government – a statement that could just as easily have been issued in 1984/85. But the Tories knew that defeating the miners would teach the entire labour movement a lesson: and so it proved, because trade unionism never recovered from the outcome of the miners’ strike. If even the miners cannot win, other workers thought, then what hope do we have?

By defeating even near-universally respected junior doctors, the government hopes it can succeed in permanently remodelling the NHS – and teach other public sector workers (teachers, for example) a lesson they will not forget.

It is perverse fantasy to suggest that junior doctors would wage the first full-scale strike in the history of the NHS on a whim. Their new contract is not just bad for them, they argue, but for the safety of their patients.

But this strike is about so much more. Not since its foundation has the NHS suffered such a protracted squeeze in real funding. The government is attempting to strip the “national” from the NHS with policies of marketisation, privatisation and fragmentation. Cuts to local care budgets are piling pressure on to the NHS, and inadequate funding will leave the NHS struggling to deal with our ageing population. If the junior doctors suffer defeat, the government believes it can continue on this disastrous course unimpeded.

That Jeremy Hunt has turned down a pragmatic cross-party deal to trial his plans says it all. Hunt wants to crush the junior doctors and send a message to all of us. Never mind the cost. Never mind if people die. Never mind if junior doctors are left utterly demoralised, and there is an exodus from the profession. It will be a milestone in the Tories’ war on the public sector, and that will make it all worthwhile. Contemptible doesn’t cover it. But this isn’t the time for bitterness. History will see this strike as a turning point, one way or the other. Let’s make sure we’re on the right side.