Junior doctors would be happy to scrap the NHS if it increased their salaries. But...

... I thought they were fighting to "save our NHS" - because that's what the BBC and the Guardian and every other compassion-mongering left-wing media outlet keeps telling us. But, according to The Sun, the results of a secret questionnaire given to 9,500 junior and student doctors tells a very different story:

The survey — composed by a medic from Hull — asked them about the NHS, the new contract and potential future strike action.

It found that 93 per cent of young doctors backed “complete privatisation” of the NHS if it meant salaries would increase “substantially”.

Rarely...

...has my flabber been so ghasted. Well, not really, because I've never understood why anyone would imagine that doctors choose their career purely because of a burning, utterly selfless desire to help others. Some do, of course - but, then, idealists can be found in all professions (with the exception of investment banking, estate agency and loan-sharking of course). I'm sure there are some NHS doctors (including the attractive young lady in the photograph above, obviously) who deliberately turn their backs on opportunities to make more money abroad or in the private sector out of loyalty to the NHS and sympathy for the patients who have no choice but to rely on it. But I suspect many of them either simply have no desire to emigrate or are worried by the competition and hassle that working in the private sector would inevitably entail. There is nothing about being a doctor - or a teacher or a nurse - that automatically makes you a better person than, say, a journalist or a road-sweeper (oh, all right - or a banker or estate agent, or even a used-car dealer). Ditto (if you're on a decent salary, as many of them are) a charity-worker. To suggest otherwise is mere sentimental and/or political posturing. Grow up and knock it off!

If you honestly believe that doctors' main concern is with saving the NHS because it's the best, most efficient and most cost-effective way to deliver care to patients, then you probably also believe the tube and train drivers' union fatcats who - after they've announced yet another vicious, disruptive, misery-spreading strike - piously assure interviewers that their primary concern is passenger safety, rather than ensuring that a bunch of talentless troglodytes continue to be paid twice as much as they're worth to do a job that your pet hamster could probably do just as well.

I know - or have known - quite a few doctors. Some of them are lovely, generous, sympathetic people (our current GP, for instance). But some of them are truly horrible, selfish, incompetent, compassionless ratbags. Ditto teachers, nurses, lawyers, civil servants, journalists etc. (I only know one tube-driver, by the way, and, annoyingly, he's a really nice bloke.) Doctors are not all "in it for themselves" (whatever that means) - but neither are they all candidates for beatification. Until our left-liberal media and our politicians stop peddling this shopworn, feelgood myth, we're stuck with the NHS in its current form. And that's not good enough.