Write a short, clear, factual news headline based on this article:
Trade unions have privately expressed qualms about the forthcoming doctors’ strikes, expressing frustration at the conduct of the talks and the demands of the British Medical Association.
The BMA is pushing for a pay rise higher than the 3.5% offered to doctors by the government, with strikes planned for next week.
However, more than a million NHS staff who are not doctors – including nurses, physiotherapists, midwives, healthcare assistants, ambulance workers and hospital porters – are due to receive an even lower pay rise of 3.3%, set via the Agenda for Change (AfC) system.
The decision of the BMA to push for more than 3.5% has caused some other unions with NHS staff to be aggrieved, especially some of those with pay set via AfC. “The deals we have been able to present to our members are becoming a much tougher sell,” one senior union figure said.
Another said they believed that the leadership of the union by resident doctors, rather than professional negotiators, meant the talks had been conducted in a chaotic fashion. “I think it stops from taking any kind of pragmatic approach.”
The first union source said they thought having resident doctors lead the negotiations resulted in less willingness to do a deal on pay and conditions that would affect people entering the workforce. “You need to zoom out sometimes and I don’t think they can see the bigger picture.”
A third senior union source said there was “undoubtedly resentment” among unions representing NHS staff who were not doctors, and a sense that the government always “seemed more willing to listen to the doctors”, but added that the BMA was doing its job for its members by pushing for the best deal possible.
Another union, the GMB, is in dispute with the BMA because of a pay offer the BMA has made to its own staff.
Staff at the BMA union are due to go on strike to coincide with the six-day resident doctors’ strike on 7 April. The BMA’s most recent pay offer to its staff of 2.75% is lower than the latest recommendation of 3.5% to resident doctors.
A BMA spokesperson said: “The BMA is the trade union for doctors and medical students. Doctors have seen their pay fall by more than a fifth since 2008-09 and we’ve been very clear in recent years that our goal is to see this restored. So this year’s award of 3.5% was never going to be acceptable as it makes no progress whatsoever at reversing these real-terms pay cuts. We are taking industrial action to achieve better for doctors. We cannot speak for other unions’ strategies or why they think it is their role to justify an inadequate government pay award to their members.
“In talks with the government, the BMA is represented by elected resident doctor leaders, alongside expert BMA staff from the BMA, bringing together invaluable on-the-ground insight from working doctors and professional negotiating expertise.
“Doctors are in a very different position to our staff. They have experienced far greater cuts in their pay in real terms since 2008 as well as a deterioration in their overall working conditions. Whilst the UK is losing doctors because pay is so low, we have very competitive pay and benefits at the BMA, extremely good staff retention and very low rates of turnover.”
NHS staff under the AfC deal are yet to begin talks about the wider structure of their pay, and their unions are likely to push for reform to pay scales. A recent Unison analysis of NHS data for England over three years shows no marked improvement, and a decline in some cases, in pay satisfaction levels for workers on AfC contracts.
Medical and dental staff are the only group where pay satisfaction levels have risen to any extent, with an 18-percentage-point increase since 2023. Unison said these findings demonstrated how many NHS employees continued to feel undervalued and that nothing had changed under the new government.
Please rewrite the following news article into a professional, SEO-friendly English report in 400 to 600 words.
Article:
Trade unions have privately expressed qualms about the forthcoming doctors’ strikes, expressing frustration at the conduct of the talks and the demands of the British Medical Association.
The BMA is pushing for a pay rise higher than the 3.5% offered to doctors by the government, with strikes planned for next week.
However, more than a million NHS staff who are not doctors – including nurses, physiotherapists, midwives, healthcare assistants, ambulance workers and hospital porters – are due to receive an even lower pay rise of 3.3%, set via the Agenda for Change (AfC) system.
The decision of the BMA to push for more than 3.5% has caused some other unions with NHS staff to be aggrieved, especially some of those with pay set via AfC. “The deals we have been able to present to our members are becoming a much tougher sell,” one senior union figure said.
Another said they believed that the leadership of the union by resident doctors, rather than professional negotiators, meant the talks had been conducted in a chaotic fashion. “I think it stops from taking any kind of pragmatic approach.”
The first union source said they thought having resident doctors lead the negotiations resulted in less willingness to do a deal on pay and conditions that would affect people entering the workforce. “You need to zoom out sometimes and I don’t think they can see the bigger picture.”
A third senior union source said there was “undoubtedly resentment” among unions representing NHS staff who were not doctors, and a sense that the government always “seemed more willing to listen to the doctors”, but added that the BMA was doing its job for its members by pushing for the best deal possible.
Another union, the GMB, is in dispute with the BMA because of a pay offer the BMA has made to its own staff.
Staff at the BMA union are due to go on strike to coincide with the six-day resident doctors’ strike on 7 April. The BMA’s most recent pay offer to its staff of 2.75% is lower than the latest recommendation of 3.5% to resident doctors.
A BMA spokesperson said: “The BMA is the trade union for doctors and medical students. Doctors have seen their pay fall by more than a fifth since 2008-09 and we’ve been very clear in recent years that our goal is to see this restored. So this year’s award of 3.5% was never going to be acceptable as it makes no progress whatsoever at reversing these real-terms pay cuts. We are taking industrial action to achieve better for doctors. We cannot speak for other unions’ strategies or why they think it is their role to justify an inadequate government pay award to their members.
“In talks with the government, the BMA is represented by elected resident doctor leaders, alongside expert BMA staff from the BMA, bringing together invaluable on-the-ground insight from working doctors and professional negotiating expertise.
“Doctors are in a very different position to our staff. They have experienced far greater cuts in their pay in real terms since 2008 as well as a deterioration in their overall working conditions. Whilst the UK is losing doctors because pay is so low, we have very competitive pay and benefits at the BMA, extremely good staff retention and very low rates of turnover.”
NHS staff under the AfC deal are yet to begin talks about the wider structure of their pay, and their unions are likely to push for reform to pay scales. A recent Unison analysis of NHS data for England over three years shows no marked improvement, and a decline in some cases, in pay satisfaction levels for workers on AfC contracts.
Medical and dental staff are the only group where pay satisfaction levels have risen to any extent, with an 18-percentage-point increase since 2023. Unison said these findings demonstrated how many NHS employees continued to feel undervalued and that nothing had changed under the new government.
The legislation has been drafted and redrafted since it was first introduced to the National Assembly at the end of 2024. Earlier drafts would have outlawed any comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany as “trivialising” the Holocaust and banned public speech calling for the ill-defined “denial” of a state’s existence.
If passed, the law in its current form will broaden the definition of “apology for terrorism” – defending or justifying terrorist acts, considered an offence in France – to include speech that “implicitly” justifies or downplays acts deemed terrorist. The law would also make it illegal to call for the “destruction” of any country recognised by France, punishable by five years in prison.
The draft law’s preamble leaves little doubt which country the authors have in mind.
“Today, anti-Jewish hatred in our country is fuelled by an obsessive hatred of Israel, whose very existence is regularly delegitimised and criminalised,” it reads.
“This hatred of the State of Israel is now inseparable from hatred of Jews,” the law says.
UN’s Albanese slams ‘shameful and defamatory’ anti-Semitism accusations against her
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The proposed law – dubbed the “Yadan law” after lawmaker Caroline Yadan, who introduced it – has split the National Assembly. Critics say it is a misguided attempt to crack down on anti-Semitism that could backfire, possibly even fuelling further hatred against the Jewish community.
A petition on the official site of the National Assembly protesting the draft bill had garnered more than 160,000 signatures as of Friday.
But the 2024 annual report released by France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights on the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia said its surveys have not found a statistically significant connection between respondents holding a negative view of the political or religious ideology of Zionism and anti-Semitic prejudices.
“It is therefore difficult to view anti-Zionism as the key driver of contemporary anti-Semitism,” the report read.
Lawmakers on the left – from Socialist Party leaders to the Greens and the hard-left France Unbowed – have slammed the law as an attempt to stifle legitimate criticism of the Israeli government by defining it as fundamentally anti-Semitic. The far-right National Rally, the right-wing Les Républicains, the centre-right bloc and a handful of Socialist Party members including former president François Hollande have backed the bill.
The French government has not been shy about its support for the law – or its assertion that opposing the creation of a Jewish state on what was previously Palestinian territory is fundamentally anti-Semitic.
Speaking at the 40th annual dinner of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions in February, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said that the government would bring the bill – first introduced by Yadan in 2024 – to a vote in the spring, arguing that the country needed new laws to deal with what he described as a new form of hatred against France’s Jewish community.
“Contemporary anti-Zionism has become the mask of an old anti-Semitism,” he said, echoing the spirit of the draft law.
Viral video falsely claims Israeli Jews are ‘stealing land’ in Morocco
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Lecornu went on to say that calls for Palestine to be free “From the River to the Sea” – a common slogan among activists – was an explicit call for Israel’s destruction since it refers to Israeli territory. Activists maintain the cry is a demand for freedom for those living on historically Palestinian land.
While Lecornu said that criticising the Israeli government and its military actions was legitimate, he accused those describing Israel’s war on Gaza as a “genocide” of “stripping Jews of their history and transforming them from victims into executioners”.
“Talking about ‘genocide’ in Gaza erases their memory of the Holocaust,” he said. “It downplays it and reverses it.”
An earlier version of the draft law proposed to make it illegal to compare Israel to Nazi Germany – an article that was removed on the advice of the Conseil d’état, France’s highest administrative court.
Nathalie Tehio, the president of France’s Human Rights League – a staunch opponent of the proposed law – warned that legally tying the protection of France’s Jewish community to protection of the State of Israel could very well fuel anti-Semitism rather than fight it.
“In reality, it equates French Jews with Israel – which is dangerous in and of itself, as this very equation fuels anti-Semitism,” she said. “But it also gives the impression that there is a double standard, because it is a law that targets the issue of anti-Semitism while also serving as a defence of Israel – so there is a double risk of reinforcing anti-Semitism.”
Other critics have slammed what they describe as overly broad or vague wording that makes it difficult to predict what statements would or wouldn’tfall afoul of the new legislation.
The French Lawyers’ Union in January warned that criminalising statements that “implicitly” justify or incite acts of terror would effectively turn judges into unwilling “thought police”.
Others have questioned the need for such a law in the first place.
François Dubuisson, a professor in international law at the Université libre de Bruxelles, said that France already had a raft of legislation targeting incitement to racial hatred and against “glorifying” terrorism.
“In my view, the current legislation in France is sufficient, because what remains in the amended version of the bill – after taking into account the opinion of the Conseil d’état – is primarily a broadening of the offense of advocating terrorism,” he said. “But it’s important to note that, even under current law, the offense of advocating terrorism is extremely broad and is, in fact, often heavily criticised by a number of international human rights organisations.”
Since the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, France’s “apology for terrorism” law has been used to summon hundreds of activists, trade unionists, researchers and left-wing politicians for police questioning over statements they’ve made in connection to the attacks.
Dubuisson said that the need for a law banning calls for a state’s destruction seemed even less clear.
“To my knowledge, this does not exist anywhere in the world,” he said. “I’m not aware of any legislation – and particularly in Europe – that contains such an offence.”
He argued that calls for the violent destruction of a state and its people would already leave the speaker exposed to a raft of existing laws criminalising incitement to violence.
And while the text’s preamble specifically mentioned Israel, the current wording would also cover calls for the destruction of the state of Palestine, which France recognised in September last year – a decision that prompted Yadan to leave French President Emmanuel Macron’s parliamentary group.
Tehio pointed out that Israel’s existence as a Jewish state continues to be fiercely debated, including by anti-Zionist Jews campaigning for what has become known as a “one-state solution” – Israelis and Palestinians sharing a single state with full and equal rights for all.
“There are some, for example, who believe that there should be a single state comprising both Israel and the Palestinian state together,” she said.
Just what statements the law would ultimately penalise remains deeply unclear. Tehio said that the French PM’s example of a direct call for Israel’s destruction – “From the River to the Sea” – can also be heard on the lips of far-right Israeli activists, though in very different contexts.
“Those who use that phrase will indeed be penalised, because it would be interpreted as implying either the destruction of the Palestinian state or the destruction of the Israeli state,” she said. “But that actually makes no sense.”
