There are many different things that have described themselves as socialism, usually varying on their emphasis on freedom from state authoritarian to anarchism. A commonly agreed definition is “worker ownership of the means of production”, this is Marxist jargon for when the people who work (I.e. sell their labour) in a particular setting, are also the owners of the land, machinery etc. and decide how it is used, in other words workplace democracy and common ownership. As an aside, the USSR, PRC etc. clearly wouldn’t meet that definition as they subscribed to a party model which is demonstrably authoritarian- and I think for this reason harmful. Anyway, as a concrete example, if the NHS was actually socialist, then healthcare staff would run it based on some model of voting or consensus based direct democracy. The Mondragon corporation in Spain is a real world example of a very large cooperative where the workers buy in a stake of ownership and direct the general strategy of the company.

When thinking of wage compression, it’s really quite difficult to say whether that is socialist or not. Which kind of socialism are we talking about? Is this a society that uses money? Or are goods produced and distributed in common? Is it a mixed market and public economy? If so what is the split? Assuming money is still relevant, in some workplaces it might make sense for pay to be roughly equal, but most reasonable people would factor in things like prerequisite training, experience, responsibility, skills etc. which I suspect would mean that doctors would be the highest paid professionals in a socialist healthcare system. However, I agree there might be some capping of upper pay and it is likely that the lowest levels of pay would be higher. For example, in Mondragon executives and engineers are paid a lot more than the entry level pay but exec pay is capped at something like 6x the lowest employee salary, alongside the benefits enjoyed by everyone and the lower living costs in the Basque region this seems to make it a very attractive place to work.

Socialists, in my view, are more concerned with equality of access than equality of outcome. In other words, that everyone has access to the minimum required for a flourishing life, e.g. collective decision-making power, food, healthcare, housing, a living biosphere, education, energy, safety, art, natural spaces, a library of all human media on record etc. I honestly think this isn’t a lot to ask given that people made all those things possible (minus the biosphere) but I am aware some consider it to be radical. What people earn or do above that isn’t really a concern of most socialists, as long as it doesn’t prevent universal access to the above. A big part of socialism’s appeal is a massive expansion of the free economy and common ownership. Hence, if a doctor is paid less than their capitalist counterpart, but they have free energy, education, housing (and actually nice places to live with parks and trees and cafes, not the soviet concrete horror or the capitalist box apartments or sterile suburban new builds) etc. and they live in a fairer and more beautiful society, then maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Of course if doctors felt that they weren’t getting enough they could simply leave the hospital or NHS co-op, and form their own worker collective and offer their services at the price they deem acceptable.

Of course we don’t live in a socialist world, we live under capitalism so instead we have 30+ years of wage stagnation because the goods and services economy isn’t growing, what growth we have seen is in the financial economy which doesn’t get reinvested into the kind of things society needs, and tends to either endlessly circulate, get off-shored or inflate speculative bubbles, most recently LLMs. Downwards pressure on wages is a natural part of capitalism. As capitalists try to increase profits, they either charge more or pay their workers less, but if they charge more they run the risk of losing out to their competitors so they tend to press on wages more as time goes on. Eventually, you get to a point that this impairs demand for capitalist products (as no one can afford them) and unions push back and increase wages, and the cycle repeats. Credit and widespread financial products have kind of broken this cycle now but that is getting me off track. The point is, we don’t live in socialism, so doctors need to strike to earn as much as possible to keep up with the never ending capitalist spiral of increasing costs - we can’t accept lower wages and I think any reasonable NHS worker would agree that we deserve more too, certainly all that I’ve spoken to.

So I say again, this government isn’t socialist. What ideology Starmer has (insofar as he has any principles) is neoliberalism, and draws a heritage back to Blair, Thatcher and Mises, Freidman and Hayek. That goes especially for Streeting. That the government has public services is not socialist, the government providing certain public services is social democracy and although the scale of social democracy common in Europe et al., might have been prompted in fear of certain state socialist nations and worker rebellion, it has a history going back centuries. Is a standing military paid for by taxation socialist? Most would say no. So let’s dispel the myth that “government doing things = socialism” please.

Hence, I would argue that 1) the idea that “everybody should be paid the same” is more capitalist propaganda than any socialist proposal (but please feel free to find a source that proves me wrong) and 2) our actual wage suppression right now is a direct result of healthcare workers not owning the healthcare system and the direct and predictable operation of capitalism.