Wes Streeting — you had a hand in the junior doctors’ latest cynical and cruel demand. Own it — Carole Malone

Another serious question – why did those greedy junior doctors bother coming into medicine at all if all they wanted to do was get rich off taxpayers’ backs? Why did they bother to take the Hippocratic Oath - promising to “do no harm” - when their strikes very definitely will cause harm?

And having been given a bumper 22 per cent last year, they can no longer pretend that this latest outrageous 30 per cent demand is about saving the NHS and patients’ lives.

I didn’t believe it last time around, and I sure as hell don’t believe it this time.

And Wes Streeting is doing exactly the right thing in refusing to meet the BMA for talks. He should tell them to shove their ludicrous pay demand where the sun don’t shine because it's cynical, calculating and cruel.

That said, it's actually the Health Secretary’s fault these greedy doctors have been able to come back with this latest spurious demand because the 22 per cent deal he gave them last year shouldhave come with conditions that stipulatedthey couldn’t come back this yearformore. But no, Streeting justmeekly handed over taxpayers’ cash, trying to look like he was better and more caring than the Tories.

And if he hoped caving into the BMA last year meant he’d somehow built a relationship with them, more fool him. The militants at the BMA just see him as a money tree and intend to screw him and Labour exactly the way they tried to screw the Tories.

Of course, now that Streeting has refused to meet them, the BMA has gone into victim mode. Ross Nieuwoudt, co-chair of the militant union, wailed this week: “When the Tories were in power, Wes Streeting kept telling them they should get into a room with us and negotiate. Now he’s not willing to even have a conversation with us.”

Well, that’ll be because junior doctors have already been given a 5.4 per cent pay increase this year - the highest in the public sector and way higher than anything nurses and consultants got.

Did they actually think they could go on having 20-30 per cent pay rises every year? Did they imagine they could keep tapping into the public’s support, believing people’s gratitude to the NHS would be the wind behind their militant wings?

Well, they can forget that because a YouGov poll last week said just 39 per cent support the strikes – and that’s before they’ve even started. When they do that figure will plummet even further.

Then, when people start dying, the reputation of every doctor in this country – even the good ones who deserve our respect – will be in the toilet thanks to their militant union.

But isn’t it gross that on the one hand doctors say they desperately care about their patients, but on the other they’re prepared to abandon them in order to line their pockets with a big fat pay rise – again?

And the BMA really must stop peddling the lie that their pay has dropped 23 per cent in real terms since 2008. That’s simply not true, and it’s a figure that has been debunked both by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the Office for National Statistics.

The BMA has based its calculations on the Retail Price Index measure of Inflation when it should have used the Consumer Price Index, which calculates the fall in their pay in real terms as just 4.7 per cent. Plus, the ONS has made clear the RPI is not a reliable indicator of inflation.

But hey, the BMA don’t want to listen to people and organisations that know what they’re talking about. It just wants to paint the sorriest picture it can to justify its appalling actions.

It’s also still telling tall tales about how all Junior doctors are on the bones of their backsides, which is tosh. The Department of Health and Social Care says doctors have had the equivalent of a 28.9 per cent pay increase in the last three years and that the average full-time basic pay for a resident doctor will hit £54,300 this year.

And that’s not including their gigantic overtime payments – time and a half for anything over 37 and a half hours, and overtime for unsocial hours and working weekends. Oh, and they get the kind of state pension the rest of us can only dream about.

On top of all that, once they’re fully qualified, they’llbe earning £200,000 a year plus.

Yes, many of us have good reason to be grateful to doctors, and yes, it is beyond doubt that they work hard, but surely they knew what the job entailed before they went into it?

And why is their union pretending that they’re working all the hours God sends - for nothing when Junior doctors are some of the highest-paid public servants in the land?

These doctors say they care about the NHS. No, they don’t. And they know full well that if their bumper pay demands are met, it will come at the cost of patient care.

Last week, we discovered the health service is facing a £2.2billion underlying deficit, and because of it, hospitals have already cut 17,000 jobs, including some nurses and doctors. And if these current pay demands are met, you can bet it’ll be more.

So no, these doctors won’t be striking to save the NHS, they’ll be striking to line their own pockets at the expense of it .

Yet, still, kidders like Ross Nieuwoudt are whining. He says the NHS is full of disillusioned doctors, like him, “striving to improve medicine in England”.

Really - by withdrawing medical care that could result in patients dying? By going on strike at Christmas, when will it present the most danger? By making sure millions will miss vital hospital appointments they have been waiting months for, thanks to the last strikes?

Yeah, they really sound like they’re trying to make the NHS better!

The cold, cruel fact is that all they’re trying to do is make things better for themselves and their bank balances!