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Hello and welcome to coffeehouse shots, the Spectators Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Cindy U and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and James Hill.

So today West Treating is about to meet the BMA, the Union of Junior Doctors, to liaise about these strikes that have been going

on for a long time.

Isabel, he said some stuff about what he wants to do and what he doesn't want to do with these

Junior Doctors strikes.

Tell us about that. Yeah so surprisingly enough he wasn't

pretending during the election campaign that he wasn't going to give him a 35% pay rise.

Still not going to give them a 35% pay rise now labors in office.

And when he was speaking at the Future of Britain, conference, the Tony Blair

Fest this morning, he said, look, the reason we were so blunt was that we wanted to be kind of

honest dealers with the junior doctors rather than stringing them along. Now there

are other things that he can do on pay as well as on conditions which I'll get

on to in a minute but you know what he could do and one of the things that I think the

BMA junior doctors committee could accept because they don't you you know, they don't want to lose face.

But also at some point they're going to have to accept that they're not going to get 35%

is a promise of staggered pay restoration when circumstances allow.

So this whole dispute is over giving a 35% pay rise

to take account of the fact that doctors have seen their pay eroded since 2008.

...