LONDON – Public sector workers on strike, cost of living climb, and government on the ropes.
“It’s hard to miss the parallels” between the infamous ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 and Britain in 2023, says Robert Saunders, historian of modern Britain at Queen Mary, University of London.
Of course, comparisons only go so far. In the 1970s it was a Labor government facing hardline socialist trade unions in a wave of strikes affecting everything from food distribution to grave-digging, while Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives sat in opposition and took their chances Was waiting for
But a mass walkout set for Wednesday could still mark a staging post for the downward spiral of Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, as it did for Callaghan’s Labour.
Britain prepares for widespread strike action on Wednesday, with an estimated 100,000 civil servants across government departments, ports, airports and driving test centers walking out along with hundreds of thousands of teachers across England and Wales, drivers from 14 national operators and 150 UK train employees. universities.
It follows rolling action by train and postal workers, ambulance drivers, paramedics and nurses in recent months. In another headache for Sunak, firefighters voted Monday night to walk out for the first time in two decades.
While each sector has its reasons for taking action, many of them are on strike. united in common cause Even with stagnant wages, inflation is still very high. And that makes it difficult for Sunak to pin the blame on the usual suspects within the trade union movement.
mr wajib
Industrial action has in the past been used as a political weapon by the Conservative Party, which can count on a significant number of ordinary voters to withdraw from public services.
As a result the Tories have often used the strikes as a stick with which to beat their Labor opponents, branding the left-wing party as looking down on their trade union donors.
but public sympathy has changed this timeAnd it’s not that easy to blame the union boos anymore.
Sunak has so far attempted to cast himself as Mr Reasonable, insisting that his “doors are always open” to workers but warning that the right to strike must be “balanced” with the provision of services. Should be To this end, he is moving forward with a long-promised law to enforce minimum service standards in areas affected by industrial action.
Unions are angered by anti-strike legislation, yet Sunak’s soft-ish rhetoric is still a relief to the famously bellicose Thatcher, who pledged during the 1979 strikes that “if anyone is curtailing our essential freedoms . .. So, by God, I will face them.
Sunak’s careful approach has been chosen at least in part because the political ground has shifted beneath him in 2020 since the coronavirus pandemic.
Public sympathy for frontline medical staff, consistently high in the UK, has been further fueled by the extreme demands placed on nurses and other hospital staff during the pandemic. And inflation is affecting workers across the economy – not just those in the public sector – helping to create a wider reservoir of sympathy for strikers than has often been found in the past.
James Frayne, a former government consultant who co-founded the polling consultancy Public First, says: “Because of the cost of living crisis, what do you [as prime minister] Can’t, as you could in the past, just paint it as an ideologically motivated strike.
starrer’s sleight of hand
Also, strikes are not the political headache they once were for the opposition Labor Party.
Callaghan was able to be portrayed as weak when Thatcher opposed the use of emergency powers against the unions. David Cameron was none too pleased to invite then Labor leader Ed Miliband to disband his “union paymasters”, especially during the last mass public sector strike in 2011.
Importantly, the trade union vote played a key role in Miliband’s election as party leader – something the Tories would never let him forget. But when Sunak tried to reiterate Cameron’s line against Miliband, few seemed convinced.
QMUL’s Saunders argues that the Conservatives are trying to replay a “1980s-style campaign” that featured Labor MPs in the pockets of unions. But “I don’t think it resonates with the public,” he said.
Labour’s current leader, Keir Starmer, has actively sought to weaken the left’s influence in the party, attracting criticism from senior trade unions. Last summer, Starmer sacked one of his own shadow ministers, Sam Tarry, after defying an order that the Labor front bench should not appear on picket lines.
Starmer was “covered”, as one shadow minister put it, by Sunak’s decision to push through minimum-service legislation. This means Labor MPs can appease trade unions by fighting the new restrictions in Parliament – without actually standing on the picket line.
So far it seems to be working. Paul Novak, general secretary of the Trade Unions Congress, an umbrella group representing Britain’s millions of trade unions, told POLITICO: “Frankly, I’m less worried about Labor frontbenchers standing on the picket line for selfies than I really am.” I’m about stuff that matters to our union”—meaning the government’s intention to “further restrict the right to strike.”
The TUC is planning a day of action against the new law on Wednesday, coinciding with the latest wave of strikes.
sticking to your guns
For now, Sunak’s approach appears to be hitting the right notes with the famously restless pack of Conservative MPs.
Sunak has designed to deal with inflation purpose His government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner.
A Tory MP for an economically disadvantaged marginal seat said: “We have to keep our guts. There is a strong sense that inflation is (just about) the corner) so we have to be as tough as possible… We can no longer enable wage growth that feeds inflation.
Another agreed: “Rishi should hold his ground. My guess is that eventually people will get fed up with strikers—especially railroad workers.”
In addition, Public First’s Frayne says his polling picked up the first signs of erosion of support for the strikes since they kicked off last summer, especially among working-class voters.
“We’re at the point now where people are realizing ‘well, I haven’t had a pay raise, and I’m not getting a pay raise,’ and can we all just accept that it’s hard for everybody And we’ve got to get on with it,'” he said.
According to new research from Public First, more than half (59 percent) of people support a nurses’ strike, compared with 43 percent for teachers, 41 percent for postal workers and 36 percent for rail workers.
‘everything is broken’
But Sunak’s wider concern for the Conservatives is that regardless of whatever personal pay deals are ultimately struck out, a wave of strikes could tap into a deep sense of malaise in Britain.
Inflation remains high, and the government’s independent forecaster predicted in December that the UK would plunge into a recession lasting more than a year.
The strike by ambulance workers drew more attention to the ongoing crisis in the National Health Service, which patients suffering from heart attacks and strokes are already facing waits over 90 minutes At the end of 2022.
Traveling across the country has been made difficult not only by strikes but also by multiple failures by rail providers on major routes.
One long-serving Conservative MP said he feared a sense of fatalism was setting in among the public – “the idea that everything is broken and there is no point asking this government to fix it. “
A former cabinet minister said the most pressing issue in his constituency is the state of public services, and the strike action signals a political threat to the government. He cautioned that the public was blaming the ministers, not the striking workers, for the disruption.
Those at the top of government are aware of the risk of such a narrative taking hold, with the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, taking aim at “Britain about decline”. a keynote speech friday,
Whether or not the government can do much to change the story, however, is less clear.
Saunders recalls Callaghan’s example, noting that public sector workers were initially willing to give the Labor government the benefit of the doubt, but by 1979 the mood had hardened considerably.
This is because strikes are not just about falling living standards, he argues. “It’s also driven by a lack of faith in the government that things are going to get better.”
With elections round the corner next year, Rishi Sunak is running out of time to change the public mood.
Annabelle Dixon and Graham Lanktree contributed reporting.