Donald Trump has indicated that he and Sir Keir Starmer could “approve” the US-UK trade deal when they meet in Scotland.

Speaking to reporters before he began his travel on Friday, the president said: “We’re going to be talking about the trade deal that we made and maybe even approve it.”

A Conservative peer has apologised for breaking the House of Lords rules by helping to secure a meeting with a minister for a Canadian company he advises.

Ian Duncan, a deputy speaker of the Lords, was found to have breached the rules by providing a parliamentary service for Terrestrial Energy when he facilitated an introduction between its chief executive and a new energy minister.

His conduct had been reported to the House of Lords standards commissioner following the Guardian’s months-long investigation examining the commercial interests of peers.

As a result of the Lords debate series, four other peers are being investigated to establish whether they breached the house’s code of conduct.

A fifth peer, Iain McNicol, a former general secretary of the Labour party, was required to apologise in May for breaking the rules by writing to the Treasury to promote a cryptocurrency firm that was paying him.

In a report published on Friday, the standards commissioner ruled that Lord Duncan of Springbank had broken the rules which forbid peers from seeking to profit from their membership of the upper chamber.

The business secretary has said the idea of a “magic wealth tax” to raise funds is “daft” amid speculation that the chancellor could turn to such a measure to plug holes in the public finances.

The government’s U-turns over welfare reform and winter fuel payments have left the Chancellor with a multibillion-pound black hole to fill, fuelling speculation she might target the assets of the wealthy in the next budget.

Rachel Reeves has not ruled out the possibility of a new wealth tax but has been eager to highlight that she will stick to her commitment not to hike tax for “working people”.

Some in the Labour party, including former leader Lord Neil Kinnock and Wales’s First Minister Baroness Eluned Morgan, have called for a wealth tax.

However, business secretary Jonathan Reynolds dismissed the idea.

“This Labour government has increased taxes on wealth as opposed to income - the taxes on private jets, private schools, changes through inheritance tax, capital gains tax,” he told GB News.

“But the idea there’s a magic wealth tax, some sort of levy... that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.

“Switzerland has a levy but they don’t have capital gains or inheritance tax.

“There’s no kind of magic (tax). We’re not going to do anything daft like that.

“And I say to people: ‘Be serious about this.’ The idea you can just levy everyone... What if your wealth was not in your bank account, (what if it was) in fine wine or art?

“How would we tax that? This is why this doesn’t exist.”

Zack Polanski, the Green party leadership candidate, has said he would be potentially willing to cooperate with a new leftwing party led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, after calls for the two groups to form an alliance.

Polanski stressed that any decision would be one for Green members, and would depend on the eventual form of a new party that does not as yet officially exist or have a name.

His comments to the Guardian open up a divide on the issue with his competitors for the leadership, Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, who have warned against the Greens becoming “a Jeremy Corbyn support act”.

A day after Corbyn and Sultana jointly launched a new website for people to register interest, with the interim title of Your party, a leftwing campaign group called for it to seek a formal alliance with the Greens in England and Wales.

We Deserve Better, which argues for electoral pacts on the left, said a united ticket for the Greens and the new party could potentially unseat dozens of Labour MPs, whereas both running could split the vote.

Polanski, currently the Greens’ deputy leader, has built his push for the leadership around the idea of making the party a mass-membership “eco-populism” organisation, which could take on not just Labour but also Reform UK.

“I’m open to working with anyone who’s up for challenging the far right threat of Reform and this unpopular Labour government,” he said.

“Exactly what this might possibly look like with regard to any sort of arrangement is a bridge I’ll cross further down the line and will be in the hands of Green party members. The new party doesn’t exist yet, and 2029 is some way off.

“If anyone’s looking for a leftwing vehicle for power and change in this country, the Greens are here right now, we’re surging, we have well established party infrastructure and we have hundreds of elected representatives across the country. Join us.”

Essex Police said a total of nine people have now been charged following the force’s continuing investigation into incidents of disorder in Epping last week.

The force said Shaun Thompson, 37, of Western Avenue, Epping, has been charged with violent disorder and criminal damage in relation to disorder in Epping on 17 July.

He appeared at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on Friday and was bailed to appear at Chelmsford Crown Court on August 18 for a plea and trial preparation hearing.

Essex Police said Dean Walters, 65, of Corner Meadow, Harlow, has been charged with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour and he is due to appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday September 24. He remains on bail.

Assistant chief constable Stuart Hooper said on Friday: “I’m really grateful to the people of Epping who wanted to make their voices heard yesterday and did so peacefully.

“I’ll take this opportunity to thank them again. As people will have seen, we had a really robust police operation around the protest.

“We wanted to ensure everyone could safely go about their business, minimising disruption, while facilitating peaceful protest.

“We are continuing to investigate those few intent on exploiting peaceful protests to launch assaults on officers, cause criminal damage, or commit disorder.

“They can expect a knock on the door.”

The Forth Road Bridge has been closed to traffic due to a Greenpeace protest.

The group said 10 of its activists have suspended themselves from the bridge in order to block an Ineos tanker from passing underneath.

Police Scotland said they were alerted at 1.05pm and officers were “engaged with those involved”. The public were asked to avoid the area.

The bridge is one of three crossing the Firth of Forth in central Scotland which links Edinburgh to Fife.

The UK government’s ban on Palestine Action limits the rights and freedoms of people in the UK and is at odds with international law, the UN human rights chief has said.

Volker Türk, the UN human rights commissioner, said ministers’ decision to designate the group a terrorist organisation was “disproportionate and unnecessary” and called on them to rescind it.

In a statement on Friday, he said the ban amounted to an “impermissible restriction” of people’s rights to freedom of expression and assembly that was “at odds with the UK’s obligations under international human rights law”.

He added that the decision restricted the rights of people involved with Palestine Action “who have not themselves engaged in any underlying criminal activity but rather exercised their rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association”.

Türk said it could “lead to further chilling effect on the lawful exercise of these rights by many people” and that the UK government should halt any police and legal proceedings against protesters who have been arrested on the basis of the proscription.

The Guardian has contacted the Home Office for comment.

Dozens of councils have been targeted by campaigners calling for a four-day week after it that emerged one local authority had become Britain’s first to vote to adopt the pattern permanently.

The move comes shortly after thousands of private-sector workers were also told they would be staying on shorter working weeks with the same pay after more than 200 businesses decided it worked for them – in some cases, after lengthy trials.

“As hundreds of British companies in the private sector have already shown, a four-day week with no loss of pay can be a win-win for both businesses and workers,” said Joe Ryle, the campaign director of the 4 Day Week Foundation.

Ryle spoke after it was confirmed that South Cambridgeshire district council had voted to become the first local authority in the UK to permanently adopt the four-day week. The Liberal Democrats-led council said independent analysis had shown “most services got better or were maintained, with significant improvements to recruitment and retention”.

Now, the campaigners have said they have compiled a target-list of at least 24 more councils, in the hope of setting off a wave of new announcements. They said they believed as many as six councils were close to taking the step in the near future.

The move towards more modern working practices has been gaining momentum recently. In February 2023, more than 50 companies opted to continue with the new working pattern after conducting the world’s largest trial of a four-day week up to that point. Campaigners hailed it as an indication that the working pattern could be adopted in the wider economy.

The International Monetary Fund has said the UK government risks being knocked off course in meeting its targets to repair the public finances and urged Rachel Reeves to give herself more leeway through tax or spending measures.

In a final version of an annual report on the UK economy, the Washington-based organisation said changes introduced by the chancellor to the government’s deficit reduction plans had enhanced the credibility and effectiveness of fiscal policy.

“Risks to this strategy must be carefully managed. In an uncertain global environment and with limited fiscal headroom, fiscal rules could easily be breached if growth disappoints or interest rate shocks materialise,” the IMF said.

The fund also said the risk of overly frequent changes to tax and spending policy could be reduced by measures including the creation of more fiscal room for manoeuvre by Reeves to meet her targets.

“The first best (option) would be to maintain more headroom under the rules, so that small changes in the outlook do not compromise assessments of rule compliance,” it said.

Zarah Sultana has claimed the new left-wing party she launched with Jeremy Corbyn has already attracted more “sign-ups” than Reform UK’s total membership.

Posting on X, the Coventry South MP wrote:

We’ve reached 230,000 sign ups! That’s more than Reform’s membership. Nigel Farage, Zia Yusuf, Richard Tice, Lee Anderson… your boys are taking one hell of a beating. Labour, you’re next.

It follows the launch of what Jeremy Corbyn and Sultana described as “a new kind of political party, one that belongs to you”.

Earlier today, during a visit to a bin strike picket line in Birmingham, the former Labour leader told reporters the party had already attracted around 190,000 sign-ups.

The Unite general secretary Sharon Graham has accused the government of abandoning workers after it announced the Lindsey Oil Refinery is set to shut.

It comes after more than 100 people gathered outside Grimsby Town Hall in protest on Thursday, demanding urgent government intervention to save the plant and protect jobs in north-east Lincolnshire.

The Unite general secretary said the site’s closure has left livelihoods hanging in the balance. “Over a thousand workers rely on the future of the oil refinery, their jobs are now at immediate risk, through no fault of their own,” Unite’s official X account said, citing Graham’s comments.

“If the government fails to act then workers at Lindsey and much further afield will rightly feel abandoned by it.”

A fresh wave of strikes has been announced by drivers at a train company in a long-running dispute over the sacking of a colleague, PA reported.

Members of Aslef at Hull Trains have voted to continue taking industrial action after months of walkouts. Unions have to ballot members on industrial action every six months.

The union already announced a strike from Sunday 1 June to Saturday 9 August.

Nigel Roebuck, Aslef’s organiser in the north-east of England, said: “Hull Trains has been telling our members that they wish to sort out this issue, but it’s nearly a month since their last meeting with Aslef and the silence is deafening.

“They also have a new managing director who, it appears, doesn’t wish to get involved.

“So trains are cancelled, passengers inconvenienced, and we now have a further mandate for six months to seek a proper and just resolution to this matter.”

The driver was sacked over a safety issue.

The Liberal Democrats have called for an ‘NHS Strike Resilience Plan’, using private hospitals for some treatments.

A spokesperson said that the plan would ensure that the harmful impacts of the strike are kept to a minimum for patients.

Lib Dem hospitals and primary care spokesperson Jess Brown Fuller said:

People across the country waiting for the treatment they desperately need will be disappointed to hear there’s yet more strikes, having already faced so much disruption in the last few years.

The government cannot afford to dither and delay, there is too much at stake- and patients deserve to get the treatment they need when they need it.

That is why the Liberal Democrats are calling for an NHS Strike Resilience Plan, to protect patients from suffering. The government needs to pull its finger out and ensure that private hospitals are on standby so that anyone set to receive treatment is not forced to go without and waitlists are not left to soar.

The visit of US president Donald Trump to Scotland is in the “public interest”, chancellor Rachel Reeves has said.

Trump is due to touch down in Scotland on Friday evening ahead of a four-day visit, during which he will meet prime minister Keir Starmer and first minister John Swinney.

His meeting with Starmer is seen as a chance to refine the UK-US trade deal which came into force last month.

Speaking to journalists during a visit to the Rolls-Royce factory near Glasgow airport on Friday morning, the chancellor talked up the importance of the visit.

“It’s in Britain’s national interest to have strong relations with the US administration and as a result of both that long-term special relationship, but actually more importantly, the work that our prime minister Keir Starmer has done in building that relationship with president Trump has meant that we were the first country in the world to secure a trade deal,” she said.

“That has a tangible benefit for people here in Scotland, whether it is people working in the Scotch whisky industry or people working in the defence sector like here at Rolls-Royce, that trade deal means lower tariffs than any country in the world on things that we send to the US.”

Speaking during a visit to a bin strike picket line in Birmingham, Jeremy Corbyn said around 190,000 people had so far “signed up” for the new party launched with Coventry MP Zarah Sultana.

Officials said Your Party was an interim name to kickstart a democratic process to decide on the new party’s eventual title.

Corbyn told journalists: “The launch is Yourparty.uk and so far, as of the last minute or two, 175,000 people had signed up for it, which is enormous.”

As his comments to reporters came to a close, Corbyn was informed that 190,000 people had registered their interest in the party, prompting him to add: “Another 15,000 have signed while we were talking.”

Asked what the new party would do about situations like the Birmingham bin strike if it won power, Corbyn responded: “We would look obviously at the situation of Birmingham city finances but insist that no worker’s wages go down and you restructure the finances accordingly.”

Michael Akadiri, an award-winning standup comedian and resident doctor, has his view on the strikes…

So there was no last-minute intervention by Wes Streeting and his team at Whitehall. Resident doctors in England (formerly known as junior doctors) are on the picket line from 7am today until 7am on 30 July, a full five-day walkout.

And I’ll be joining them, in solidarity. Though I’m a resident doctor by grade, I currently work for NHS England on a freelance (locum) basis, so I’ll be supporting my colleagues by electing not to work on the aforementioned days, despite the sauteed carrot of “enhanced strike rates”.

Whenever doctors are engaged in a public pay dispute, our status as “heroes” is lost to accusations of shirking and self-interest. These attitudes even play out within different generations of doctors.

Discussing money in the sector has historically been taboo. When I was in medical school between 2011 and 2016, I can remember students being reprimanded by established doctors for any suggestion that they were pursuing medicine “to make money”. Those with “pound signs in their eyes” were advised to seek a career in the City instead. There was no need to discuss finances, as the understanding was that being a doctor was a challenging and noble vocation that, while it may never make you rich, would leave you more than financially secure.

You could look to consultants as examples of such financial security. After years of arduous training, they’ve arguably reached the top of their profession, the pinnacle. Many of them are covering for resident doctor colleagues over the weekend so residents can strike safely, reportedly advised to demand up to £6,000 a shift. Some may balk at such fees, but how much would a top lawyer charge to work out of hours?

With becoming a consultant no means a guarantee, debts of more than £100,000 and a rota that can be unforgiving, conditions for resident doctors are challenging. Then you throw in pay – 20% less in real terms compared with a doctor in 2008. Then, potentially, you can understand why morale is low among resident doctors.

Parents and children will from Friday “experience a different internet for the first time” as a result of the Online Safety Act, the technology secretary insisted as he said he had “high expectations” over the changes.

Peter Kyle told Sky News:

The act, as you said, has taken a long time to come into force, so it means the technology companies themselves have seen this coming for a very long time, and had all that time to prepare.

So I have very high expectations of the change that children will experience.

And let me just say this to parents and children, you will experience a different internet really, for the first time in from today, moving forward than you’ve had in the past. And that is a big step forward.

Speaking outside the Bristol Royal Infirmary, Dr Fareed Al-Qusous, 26, a year 3 academic foundation doctor, said the strike was a “last resort”.

“No doctor wants to take industrial action as it’s a form of last resort and I would rather strike zero days,” he said.

“But the most recent pay uplift represents a 1% real terms uplift. At that rate it would take roughly 20 years to restore a 21% pay erosion.

“Wes Streeting said that pay restoration is a journey - we’re willing to take him on that journey, but that journey is far beyond the lifespan of this government.

“A first year doctor, who gets paid £9,000 less than their assistant, gets paid £18-an-hour. We’re asking for them to get paid £23-an-hour, which is an extra £5-per-hour increase.

“It doesn’t have to be in one go, it can be a multi-year pay deal and the strikes can be called off immediately. If you ask the public is a doctor worth £23-an-hour, you get an astounding yes, if anything it’s a bargain.”

Some more images coming in from the picket lines up and down the country…

Patients at St Thomas’ Hospital have voiced their support for junior doctors taking part in the latest round of strike action over pay and conditions.

Jo Irwin, 72, who was attending the London hospital for a blood test before surgery for a hernia, said she had “no hesitation” in backing the walkout.

“I am fully behind the strikes and the public should be as well,” she said.

“Without these doctors I would be dead. They are looking after sick people. I am very angry about it.

“They should get all the money they want - and more than Keir Starmer and his cronies.”

Mohammed Dinee, 42, from Brixton, also gave his backing to the industrial action after being admitted recently with back pain.

“Today I had a physiotherapy appointment - it was fine, no complaints,” he said. “But I got admitted other day for back pain - you could feel it. It was difficult to get an MRI scan.

“They’re strained - being inside St Thomas’, you can see it. I fully support them.”

Peter Kyle also defended the government’s resistance to calls for immediate UK recognition of a Palestinian state, insisting Keir Starmer wants sovereignty “more than anyone else” as part of a political process.

The technology secretary was repeatedly asked why Britain will not follow France in saying it will recognise a Palestinian state.

He told Sky News: “We want Palestinian statehood. We desire it, and we want to make sure the circumstances can exist where that kind of long-term political solution can have the space to evolve and make sure that it can become a permanent circumstance that can bring peace to the entire region. But right now, today, we’ve got to focus on what will ease the suffering, and it is extreme, unwarranted suffering in Gaza that has to be the priority for us today.”

Asked why the UK was holding back on confirming recognition, he said: “Because we believe that statehood is something that is a political process, and it should be part of the political settlement that will lead to a safe and secure Israel and a Palestinian statehood with all the sovereignty that goes alongside it.”

He added: “I don’t want anybody who is viewing this to underestimate our anxiety about what is happening in Palestine, in Gaza right now, and our desire to deliver a Palestinian state.”

Kyle said the debate in the Labour party was over how statehood is reached rather than whether it is reached, adding: “Keir Starmer wants this more than anyone else, but believes it is a crucial step towards delivering the peace and security into the future, and needs to be a negotiated peace within the region itself. It can’t be forced.”

Meanwhile, a cabinet minister has said “the chaotic Jeremy Corbyn” does not “think about governing, he thinks about posturing” in an attack on the former Labour leader.

Asked about Corbyn’s launch of a new party, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told Times Radio: “I was a Member of Parliament in the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, and the chaos and instability that he brought to our party I’m now viewing him wreak in his new party, and I’m just very glad that I’m looking on it from the outside this time, rather than having to experience it from the inside.”

Asked about Corbyn’s claim that Labour is a “top-down” outfit full of “control freaks”, Kyle said: “Well, look, Jeremy says a lot of things, but the thing that worries me the most about what he says is that he doesn’t want to spend money defending our country, that he is against the money that Labour is investing into the defence of our country. At the moment, these are the things that should fundamentally worry us about the words of Jeremy Corbyn.

“He’s not a serious politician. He doesn’t think about governing, he thinks about posturing. And we see that writ large at the moment, because all the posturing, of course, just puts him at odds with his own supporters, which is why you’ve got George Galloway saying he won’t join it.

“And you’ve got, you know, they... can’t even agree a name before launching their party. This is the kind of chaotic circumstances that follows Jeremy around like a trail... I never quite understood his leadership, even when I was experiencing it up close, but that’s for them to decide.

“The Labour party is now led by somebody who has the very clear interest of our country at heart. It is country first, and that’s the kind of thing I think people are responding to.

“We see Keir acting incredibly well on the international stage in recent months, tackling some of the big issues facing the world and its economy and he’s thrown himself into fixing our public services. I think this is the kind of leadership that people respond to, not that of the chaotic Jeremy Corbyn.”

Resident doctor Kelly Johnson said Wes Streeting’s opposition to the strikes felt like “a slap in the face”.

Speaking outside St Thomas’ Hospital, where she works, she told the PA news agency: “Every union has the right to strike. It feels like a slap in the face to say that we are doing something that is unjust. Just because we’re doctors doesn’t mean we can’t come out and strike and protest for what we think is right.”

She added: “When doctors decide to take strike action it’s always portrayed as though we’re being selfish but we’re here as a body to help the public day in day out to work hours that don’t even end sometimes.

“Here we are just trying to get what’s right for us so we can do our best to serve the public.”

Speaking outside Leeds General Infirmary, paediatrics registrar Cristina Costache said: “Reducing the waiting list is a really good target but you’re going to reduce the waiting list if you increase the numbers of posts, if you give better pay so the jobs don’t leave for another country, like I did from my home country.

“You’re going to feel differently when you come to work if you feel valued, it just makes such a big difference. It makes that extra tiredness, that extra coming in and giving away the time that you could have spent with your parents that are ill, or with your family, or with your children. So they have to think about that rather than numbers.

“I look after quite rare diseases in children and my patients aren’t numbers.”

Dr Costache said she left Romania due to the poor health infrastructure and lack of investment.

She said: “It’s really sad to have seen in the last nine years, since being here, how the NHS is heading that way. Hence, I’m a trade unionist because I feel like I want to tell people please ‘don’t do what has happened there’.

“It can be really scary and really bad, and you don’t want to be in that place.”

Around 30 doctors and supporters gathered outside Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) on Friday morning, waving placards and cheering as passing cars beeped horns in support.

Cristina Costache, who is a paediatrics registrar at the LGI and a PhD student, said: “It’s a very difficult decision to make always, because I love my job and that’s the reason I went into it. I get depressed if I’m not in work. My heart is always at work.

“But I also care about my colleagues and my profession.”

Dr Costache said: “I’m seeing more and more gaps as registrars. There’s always a gap on the paediatric registrar rota. We end up having to cover the job of another paediatric registrar, of even two other paediatric registrars.

“My SHOs (senior house officers) also have gaps, so I sometimes have to cover their job as well as my registrar job. And that’s not safe and that’s not OK.

“And the reason that that happens is that they’re poorly paid. If you’re poorly paid, why would you want to come in on your free time when you know you’re going to be on nights the next day and then so three or four nights in a row?”

Dave Bell, a retired nurse and member of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, stood in solidarity with striking doctors outside St Thomas’ Hospital.

“Britain’s doctors are the backbone of our NHS,” he said. “If you ask anyone who’s been to a hospital, they’ll tell you those staff work their socks off.”

He called for urgent pay restoration, adding: “We need to value those doctors and restore their pay to what it was 15 years ago.”

But he acknowledged the difficulty of strike action within NHS teams.

“I took strike action once when I was a nurse - of course it causes tensions. You’re working hard, and if medical staff walk out, it gets even harder for those still in.”

Despite this, he said unity was crucial, adding: “In the long run, people have got to work together - the unions too. It can be overcome.”

BMA council chairman, Dr Tom Dolphin, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme “nobody wants to be on strike” but Wes Streeting’s offer “did not contain anything substantive”.

He added: “Where we were last year when we started the pay campaign, we were down a third on our pay compared to 2008. So you’ve got last year’s pay offer which did indeed move us towards (pay restoration), but Wes Streeting himself said that pay restoration is a journey, not an event, implying that there would be further pay restoration to come, and we were expecting our pay to be restored in full - that’s our campaign’s goal.

“We got part way there, but then that came to a halt this year - we’ve only had an offer that brings us up, just to catch up with inflation.”

Asked what it would take for doctors to go back to work, he said the BMA needed to see “a clear, guaranteed pathway” to pay restoration.

He added that “it’s very disappointing to see a Labour government taking such a hard line against trade unions”, adding: “They’re talking about punishing the trade union, talking about punishing doctors, holding them back in their training, making sure that they don’t get locum shifts, that kind of thing.

“People are talking about that which, of course, is not legal. And if we find cases of people being held to detriment for having taken part in strikes, we’ll be fighting their case for them. It’s just disappointing to hear that kind of rhetoric coming from a Labour administration.”

Here are some images from the strikes this morning…

Striking doctors say their demand is simple - restore pay to 2008 levels.

Dr Ryan said: “We want to be paid fairly and we want an excuse to stay in the NHS and do what we enjoy, which is looking after patients.”

She argued that doctors have seen the worst pay erosion across the public sector and said: “Doctors should not need to subsidise the NHS with their wages.”

Dr Ryan apologised to patients for the disruption caused by the strike, saying: “It really is disruptive - and I’m sorry for that.”

But she added: “I apologise to patients every day because the NHS isn’t giving them the service they deserve.”

“We’re under-doctored and understaffed. And that’s a political choice not to fund this properly.

“We need a government that will invest in the NHS, not only for me, but also for the patients.”

Dr Melissa Ryan, co-chairwoman of the BMA’s UK resident doctors committee, told the PA news agency that rising living costs are forcing many doctors into debt.

She said a first-year doctor with £80,000-100,000 of student debt can expect to lose 9% of their salary for life repaying it.

“We work long nights and unsociable hours, get flung around the country, and still some of us struggle to pay rent,” she said.

“That’s because our pay has been eroded by 21% since 2008 - it’s like working one day a week for free.”

Around 15 doctors and supporters are gathered on Westminster Bridge, near the entrance to St Thomas’ Hospital, as the latest round of NHS strike action gets under way.

Some are holding placards reading “£18.62/hour is not a fair wage for a resident doctor”, and “Pay doctors, not PPP.”

Others have printed out an old tweet by health secretary Wes Streeting accusing the previous government of failing to prevent strikes, PA reported.

One man is standing beside the striking doctors, selling copies of The Socialist newspaper to passers-by.

Chants of “What do we want? Fair pay. When do we want it? Now” echo across the bridge.

The Conservatives have accused Labour of having “opened the door” to fresh resident doctors’ strikes with a “spineless surrender to union demands last year”.

Shadow health secretary Stuart Andrew said: “They handed out inflation-busting pay rises without reform, and now the BMA are back for more.

“They are disrupting care, ignoring patients and gambling with lives.

“This is a betrayal of the NHS and those who rely on it.

“The public deserves hospitals where the doctors are on the frontline rather than the picket line.

“But every day Labour refuses to stand up to union overreach, Britain moves closer to a health service run on the unions’ terms rather than the patients’.”

Here is an account of the situation on the ground from a consultant, raising concerns about patient safety as a result of the strikes…

It is hard to believe that, yet again, we are going into industrial action by our resident (formerly junior) doctors. It has only been a year since the last round of strikes and the length of this one – five days at two weeks’ notice over the summer when people are away – is designed to send a message.

Consultants were, by and large, supportive of the previous rounds of strikes. There is a recognition our residents have it harder than we did. There is more financial hardship than there used to be, their salaries don’t go as far as ours did when we were training, and they have amassed more student debt.

In addition, they have to pay many thousands of pounds in General Medical Council registration and compulsory conference and examination fees that are nowhere near covered by their shrinking study budgets – this always seemed outrageous while I was training too. Consequently, most consultants were pleased when residents received their 22% pay award last year. It felt like a step in the right direction.

This time, however, it feels different. There seems to be almost no discussion about the strikes, other than around how we cover them. Most of us are worried about being seen as unsupportive; we know our residents talk to one another and we might get a reputation if we say what we really think.

In the conversations I have had, however, the feeling is that it is too soon to go again and there is little hope of any further awards on pay at this stage. There is no question that consultant support for this round of strikes is much lower than previously.

Read the full piece here:

Louise Stead, group chief executive of Ashford and St Peter’s and Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trusts, was asked about NHS trusts refusing catch-up shifts for striking doctors and fellow consultants, which enables them to earn extra cash.

It has been suggested the NHS England move to keep as much pre-planned care going as possible means there will be fewer catch-up shifts needed, and therefore doctors will not be able to top up their pay.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

There is a finite amount of money. We’ve been told very clearly that we need to manage within the budget we’ve got, and we do need to try and make sure that we reduce the waiting list, which I think you’ll see have come down, so we will not be having the resources in order to do a massive amount of catch-up lists. We absolutely won’t.

It will be around re-diverting resources we’ve got in a different way, making the best decision we can.

Asked if she was not going to be prepared to pay extra, because the money simply is not there, she said:

Absolutely.

Louise Stead, group chief executive of Ashford and St Peter’s and Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trusts, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that around 500 appointments were being rescheduled but most work was continuing.

She said:

We’ve got about 500 appointments over the five days so far taken down, but we are continuing to do about 96% of the work we’ve had planned.

We have obviously become pretty adept at trying to plan for these (strikes), but it’s not something any of us want to do. And it’s not just actually planning for today.

It’s the knock-on effect of the ongoing weeks where you have to reschedule appointments. And I think that’s what’s going to make a difference every time. That’s what makes a difference to people’s perception, because their appointments have changed.

Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of NHS Providers, told the PA news agency health staff will be working “flat out” to see as many patients as they can during the strike, after NHS England made clear it wants as much pre-planned care as possible to continue.

He said:

Striking doctors should think carefully if they are really doing the right thing for patients, for the NHS and for themselves.

The strike will throttle hard-won progress to cut waiting lists, but NHS trust leaders and staff will be working flat out to see that as many patients as possible get the care they need.

Sir Keir Starmer has made a last-minute appeal to resident doctors, saying the strikes would “cause real damage”.

“The route the BMA Resident Doctors Committee have chosen will mean everyone loses. My appeal to resident doctors is this: do not follow the BMA leadership down this damaging road. Our NHS and your patients need you,” he wrote in The Times.

He added:

Most people do not support these strikes. They know they will cause real damage.

Behind the headlines are the patients whose lives will be blighted by this decision. The frustration and disappointment of necessary treatment delayed. And worse, late diagnoses and care that risks their long-term health.

It’s not fair on patients. It’s not fair on NHS staff who will have to step in for cover for those taking action. And it is not fair on taxpayers.

These strikes threaten to turn back the clock on progress we have made in rebuilding the NHS over the last year, choking off the recovery.