NEARLY eight out of 10 doctors in Scotland are willing to strike over pay, according to a survey by the British Medical Association.

Nine out of 10 consider the current pay offer too low, while a whopping 88 per cent complain their contribution to the NHS was not reflected in the offer.

Scottish medics are not unique in feeling this way. Millions of workers share their sentiments. An unacceptable pay offer is normal. When, in the context of runaway price inflation, it amounts to a massive pay cut, it is a provocation.

Following revelations that Tory leadership contender Liz Truss has a long-term belief that doctors’ pay should be cut, and that patients should be charged for GP visits, the best diagnosis is that medical professionals’ trust in the government will plummet. It was flatlining anyway.

Note that the Royal College of Nursing is planning to ballot members on a possible strike.

The baseline of Truss’s thought is that public expenditure must be cut. Her actual words, that government should “reduce the pay of doctors and NHS managers by 10 per cent” and that universal child benefit should be scrapped and instead “be targeted on families with low incomes” reveals the thinking behind her current bid to become Tory Party leader and prime minister.

We know — from the preference of the rich for the separate, private provision of health and education — that they resent taxation which is the essential foundation of the collective provision of the essentials of civilised existence. For millions of working people child support is vital in the early years of family life.

Cocooned in the privileged world of private education and health that wealth enables, they regard both universal provision and income tax as an imposition.

The rest of us, who derive our income from work rather than property and wealth, easily understand that a comprehensive taxation system is the a better way of funding the collective foundations of modern existence than each of us paying for it separately.

The importance for working people of child benefit is revealed by new TUC research which shows that one in five households where adults are classed as “key workers” has children living in poverty.

The TUC said its study suggests the number of children growing up in poverty in key worker households has increased by 65,000 over the past two years to nearly one million.

In some regions more than two-fifths of children in these key worker households are living in poverty.

When she makes her pitch to the Tory membership Truss, no less than her rival the billionaire Rishi Sunak, has something of a problem in that the Tory leadership contest is not conducted behind closed doors but in the full glare of public scrutiny.

Nevertheless, both of them need to maximise their appeal to this highly unrepresentative group of electors which, typically, is highly sensitive to any threat to their wealth and privilege.

That in doing this they sacrifice some of the deceptive appeal which patrician politics confers on this party of privilege is a price they pay for maintaining the facade of democracy.

In the same way Keir Starmer was compelled to maximise his appeal to the Labour Party membership.

Compared to the clumsy contortions of the Tory duo, he did this with the consummate skill of a professional liar and repudiated his promises with the patrician arrogance of a man who knows that his route to No 10 depends on convincing our ruling class that, in event of the Tory Party losing its touch, he will be a safe pair of hands.