Those evil, greedy doctors!

The BMA says the pay of a junior doctor has fallen by 26 per cent in real terms since 2008/09 because pay rises have been below inflation. It is calling for 'full pay restoration', which would amount to a 35 per cent pay rise and be worth up to £20,000 extra for some medics.

- Daily Mail

Never mind the 'some medics' - a ploy to get us envious and angry; the maths is correct. If your real-terms pay drops by 26 points from 100 to 74, you need (1.35*74) to get back to 100 where you started, i.e. a 35% increase. 

This is not a pay rise but, as the doctors' association says, a restoration - and I haven't seen a claim for the money lost in the intervening years.

It's what happens when a government loses control of inflation. 

In a way it's a rerun of the 1970s, when Arab oil producers retaliated against the West for supporting Israel in Middle Eastern conflict, by inflating the price of oil. This made everything pricier in our energy-dependent economy and triggered a wave of industrial action as groups of workers tried to recoup their real-terms earnings losses.

Yes, there were some Marxists in unions trying to destabilise the system so that - the great Marxian dream - a better world would magically arise from the ruins; but there was a lot more going on that was not doctrinaire-political.

I remember two words cropping up again and again in these disputes: 

'parity' - a claim to get the same pay as another group doing the same work somewhere else; and 

'differential' - a claim for higher pay by more skilled workers who found that despite their more valuable expertise, their earnings were getting closer to that of less skilled workers as the latter won their pay bargaining cases.

The 'oil shock' started in 1973, the Conservative government fell in 1974 and the incoming Labour Government had to deal with industrial disputes for the next five years.

It was a very long time before I found out that Alan Bleasdale's BBC drama series 'Boys from the Blackstuff', described as

'TV's most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era and as a lament to the end of a male, working class British culture'

may have been screened in 1982, but was based on Bleasdale's 'The Black Stuff' Play For Today, scripted in 1978 during the Prime Ministership of Labour's James Callaghan.

In rugby there is a move called a 'hospital pass' where you throw the ball to a colleague who is then obliterated by the fast-oncoming opposition. Similarly, some political parties may be tempted to lose a General Election so that the 'other lot' has to clean up the mess and take the blame for all the hard things they are forced to do.

This could be where we are now. 'Demirep' speculates that both Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US are trying not to win the next election because they can see what is coming: