An MP criticised Jeremy Hunt for his ‘kamikaze’ approach to junior doctors

The Junior Doctors are back on strike today. As everyone in the western world likely knows by now, they’re protesting at the imposition of a contract they deem to be unfair at best and dangerous at worst.

Today, MP Heidi Alexander, the MP for Lewisham East, and as shadow secretary of state to health, Hunt’s opposite number, called him out on what she called a “kamikaze approach to the junior doctor contract”.

ITV News tweeted a video from inside the House earlier on.

It’s fighting talk. “No matter how this dispute ends, he will have lost the goodwill of staff on which the NHS survives,” Alexander said. “How can he stand here and talk about patient safety when it is him and him alone who is to blame for the current industrial action, the destruction of staff morale, and for the potential exodus of junior doctors to the Southern Hemisphere.”

The doctors walked out at 8am this morning and will strike until tomorrow night, providing only emergency care until tomorrow night. There are two further 48-hour strikes slated for April.

Hunt’s contribution is a fleeting half-smile, half-grimace before staring at his likely clammy hands and probably wishing people were still calling him a cunt by accident.