Ministers have been presenting their dispute with junior doctors as a new “miners’ moment” – a trial of strength between the elected government and an overmighty trade union. In the 1980s, it was Margaret Thatcher v the National Union of Mineworkers; now it is Jeremy Hunt v the British Medical Association.
Hunt may face the harder battle. Miners, despite their heroic status among some sections of the public, lived mainly in isolated communities. Most people had never met a miner; almost everybody has met a junior doctor and would find it difficult to envisage such a person as “the enemy within”.
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