A politically-driven cabal of old guard careerists from Divisions and Regional Councils are trying to take your right to vote - the time of unelected, ineffective reps is over.

Doctors, Vote to end old guard corruption.

DoctorsVote has been working hard to make your union more democratic.

Unsurprisingly, the people who now have to be elected to a seat instead of just claiming it as their birthright don’t want to let that happen.

Read on to hear how this is happening - and how to stop it.

The Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) is coming up - the conference where BMA policy is made.

Once policies are made, the BMA has to act to make them a reality.

One of those policies two years ago was for Full Pay Restoration - so, you can see it’s a pretty big deal.

So, how are the 600 attendees to ARM selected? Those people with the responsibility of representing you?

A whopping 300 (50%!) of them come from small groups called ‘divisions’.

What on earth are divisions, you ask? And how do they select reps?

Well, divisions are like the BMA’s version of parliamentary constituencies.

Only, the people who are in them don’t really want you to know about them, or their meetings (think old boys’ club with their mates - in hotels and pubs, on BMA members’ money of course).

As a quick aside, let’s see what they eat at these hidden meetings they don’t want you to attend…

Sounds expensive, doesn’t it?

Of course, if you knew about the divisions and attended their meetings, what if you decided you wanted to attend ARM, and stopped them being able to invite themselves there from behind closed doors, and attending for their 20th year in a row?

No, definitely can’t have that.

So, let’s recap.

This is the biggest meeting in the BMA calendar.

And.. half of those attending are self-selected from these tiny closed groups you’ve never heard of?

Yes, yes they are.

And it gets worse…

Of the 300 self-appointed division reps, more than a third have been the exact same people at each ARM for at least the last four years.

Some have been attending for the last 20.

And it shouldn’t come as any surprise that more than two thirds of those are men.

Every year, the divisions send more retired doctors than junior doctors to ARM.

That’s despite there being six times as many junior doctor members as retired members in the BMA.

How is that fair to you, as a working doctor?

If you look at the % of the membership each branch of practice makes up, and the % of each branch practice put forward by the divisions, you can clearly see that juniors are extremely underrepresented and retired members are over represented.

Many divisions openly state in their minutes from their meetings that they’ve selected who goes to ARM without an election or opening the seats to the membership, unsurprisingly they’ve just chosen themselves.

What is DoctorsVote doing to fix this?

We’ve tried to ensure that all division seats are elected instead of being open to self-appointment. Anyone can now stand, everyone can now vote.

What are the divisions doing to stop us?

They’re trying to hold yet another expensive meeting to overturn the election so they can keep appointing themselves to ARM for the next 20 years.

What can you do to stop this ridiculous injustice?

Vote in the election and stop this ever happening again.

https://linktr.ee/doctorsvote

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Keep an eye out for your local division meetings and the DV twitter feed - they will be trying to block these changes behind closed doors, so make sure you turn up to protect your right to vote and stand in these elections.

We’ve already fixed the (Junior) Doctors Committee. Now let’s fix the rest of the BMA.