Whenever people mention licensing practitioners of some trade, the interesting question is always "licence to do what?". All too often, the answer tends to be a boring and poorly thought out "licence to call yourself an X". It fails to answer "what can an X legally do that a non-X cannot?"

In the case of doctors, pharmacists and lawyers,things like surgery, controlled drugs, rights of audience are easy to restrict. If you are not one and try to do the job anyway, you won't get very far.

As a client, I cannot use a partitioner who is not licensed in my jurisdiction. If I have a video consultation with a real foreign doctor, they still can't write me a prescription I can take to my local pharmacist. No matter how good the doctor is, they are made deficient by not being registered with the GMC.

A journalist writes and publishes articles about current affairs. You can't legally prevent people doing that without a catastrophic infringement of free speech.

Every day, I read articles from publications from many countries. Those articles are not made deficient by the fact that they are not written by NUJ members.

Plenty of people read and believe bunkum written by people who don't even pretend to be journalists. Sticking little "licenced by..." Logo on the real stuff won't make a difference there.