Pelagius the strike breaker

I could just cop out of this and say my work rota these days does not include working on a Thursday, so any view I might have about the doctor's strike today might be considered purely academic. However, plenty of people who aren't even doctors have had their say on the subject, so I guess I'm as entitled as anyone else to put my oar in.

The word on the street is that the medics are not getting a lot of support from the gen pub, and you can kind of see why. Doctors are protesting about their pension arrangements, which have been changed by a government with one eye on enforcing the new austerity measures and the other on the growing pressure on pensions due to a burgeoning elderly population. What they've done to the docs is unfair, but it is no more, or even rather less than has been inflicted on a huge number of public and private sector employees. Thousands of these have not only had the pensions squeezed; they've lost their jobs altogether.

And so the ordinary citizen examines the pensions doctors can look forward to under the new arrangements, getting on for 50K a year and a six figure lump sum, and they think, mm, doesn't sound too bad to me. So what are they whining about?

We doctors need to be very careful to keep the public onside and not give them an opportunity to see us as money grabbing bastards. Most doctors aren't; they work long and hard for their superior remuneration, but that fact is getting lost amidst the cries that we seem to be demanding a better deal than everyone else.