JP Morgan money strike sees Labour bow down to it

‘Labour’ bows down to JP Morgan’s money strike, while telling the doctors’ worker strike to get f*cked

Banking giant JP Morgan has gone on a capital strike (withholding investment). Following this, Labour has been quick to offer an 100% discount on the bank’s business rates, spread out over “a period of years”.

At the same time, doctors have been on a workers’ strike for pay restoration and job security. It appears that, when it comes to workers, Labour suddenly find the will to say no.

The Capital party?

If ‘Labour’ rebranded as ‘Capital’, we probably wouldn’t consider it an April Fool’s Day joke. As well as JP Morgan, pharmaceutical giants have been demanding that the NHS pay them more, or they will withhold investment. Labour agreed to a 25% increase in payments for essential drugs in December 2025.

Meanwhile, resident doctors are asking for real-terms pay restoration to 2008 levels, at 21%. The government is offering a 7.1% increase partly because it disputes the doctors’ use of the Retail Price Index (RPI) to calculate inflation. Apparently, RPI is good enough for calculating increases in student debt, rent and corporate pricing. However, it isn’t sufficient for a doctor’s pay.

Another part of the dispute is specialist doctor posts in the NHS. The government is proposing to increase them from 1,000 to around 4,000. The thing is, the number of specialist applications is projected to exceed 40,000 this year.

Overall, the UK is low on doctors per 1,000 people at 3.2. Some of the highest per capita doctor levels are in Austria (5.48) and Germany (4.53).

48-hour deadline (not for JP Morgan, of course)

Labour has given resident doctors 48 hours to accept the deal. The British Medical Association (BMA) rejected the offer without putting it to a member vote.

The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee, Dr Jack Fletcher, has said:

We’ve been willing and have been talking constructively for the last two months and at the very last minute the government has shifted the goalposts of the pay offer. I am very happy and willing to sit down and talk constructively once again.

He further responded to withholding a members vote on the pay and jobs offer:

We discussed this with our committee who are elected to represent our members. Their representatives have considered this offer. We don’t think it goes far enough on pay so we decided not to put this to our members.

While members should decide if they accept the offer, the government goes far too easy on capital like JP Morgan compared to workers. That’s an affront to how the Labour party was founded.

Featured image via the Canary

Comments 1

D71 says:

3 months ago

And, as you have slso noted in previous articles, the government doesn’t need to borrow from JP Morgan, or anyone else. They could have taken the opposite stance, a 100% tax on bonuses. Definitely the Capital party, and seemingly more so than the Tories. Between the late 1960s and now, the share of national income to wages has declined from 66% to around 49%. Govt doesn’t lack the power to act on behalf of workers, it just doesn’t want to. Something happens when people are elected – they stop caring about their parents, siblings, children, wider family, friends, acquaintances, others in general. There is no other conclusion that can explain the structures of poverty and destitution that govt creates. The govt can end poverty, since it is solely responsible for its existence in the first placeb – they create the law, set the policy and decide the spending and so on. There is no non-violent way out of this permanent and increasing crisis. The government will keep worsening the majority’s conditions because it is already at war with the majority. This is true the world over, yet somehow people seem to accept being governed. I don’t, I see all government as toxic, and electoral politics as an absurd inversion of the meaning of democracy, which would look more like anarchism if genuinely enacted – there would certainly be no rulers. I intend to vote for the Green Party, because, as long govt imposes itself illegitimately upon us (voting is not a legitimising act, since there is no option of inviting it to, politely, dismantle itself on the ballot), thevtask is to make it as unharmful as possible, and tge Greens seem to be that party.