Britain is braced for a winter of strikes – yet a
public backlash just hasn’t happened
Gaby
Hinsliff
Support for public sector workers shows that most
people realise the government’s in the wrong, not exhausted nurses
Fri 9 Dec
2022 17.02 GMT
Winter is
suddenly here, and with it a chill descending. This Arctic snap brings with it
the season of falls on icy pavements, breathing difficulties aggravated by the
cold, cars skidding off frozen roads and drunken Christmas party casualties.
The worst time of year, you might think, for the first ambulance strike since
the 1980s and the first national nurses’ strike in more than a century,
especially as the NHS is grappling with a rush of parents understandably
panicking about an outbreak of strep A.
The armed
forces may be drafted in to cover, somewhat ironically given that they, too,
are public sector workers who spent the pandemic building hospitals and
shipping PPE in return for a less than bumper payrise. But it’s still no time
to be old and frail, worrying about what might happen if you slip on the
stairs, or to be a family without a car, wondering how you’d get a child to
hospital in the middle of the night.
Then again,
a winter of strikes is no time to be a lot of things. It’s no time to be a pub
or restaurant owner who barely survived lockdown and is now facing yet another
round of cancelled bookings, thanks to train strikes leaving office partygoers
fearful of getting stranded. It’s no time to be a child who struggled with home
schooling and is now missing lessons once again, thanks to a teachers’ strike
in Scotland.
A wave of
industrial action affecting everything from the Christmas post to new year
getaways, with border officials at some of the country’s busiest airports due
to walk out later this month, means everyday life is about to get more
difficult for most of us, and actively frightening for some. But, to put it
bluntly, that’s the point of strikes. They’re designed to make life miserable;
to jolt us into realising how quickly life would fall apart if it wasn’t for
whoever is withdrawing their labour, and thinking again about how much that
labour is worth to us. Which makes it all the more interesting that half of the
respondents to a YouGov poll this week backed paramedics and 999 call-handlers
striking, despite the potentially frightening consequences, and 48% opposed
government proposals to ban them from doing so.
That
groundswell of support could, of course, change if (and God forbid) something
tragic happens as a result of strike action. But for now, it seems there is
still an awful lot of goodwill in the bank for NHS workers. We know they were
there for us when it counted and we know, too, how agonising many will find it
to leave patients in the lurch. If even they are at the end of their tether,
something has gone very badly wrong.
It’s not
that Britain has suddenly fallen in love with organised labour. (If anything,
the reverse is true, with negative views of unions up nine points this month,
according to YouGov’s regular tracker poll; there’s still broad opposition to
train strikes, too, possibly because of the wearying regularity with which they
come round.) But nurses explaining they’re so broke that they have to rely on
food banks can’t credibly be portrayed as greedy, and threatening to withdraw
emergency workers’ right to strike simply isn’t a serious response. If people
at breaking point lose their right to walk out in protest, then the only choice
left is to walk away for good, and that’s the last thing an already
understaffed NHS needs. This isn’t 1979, when Margaret Thatcher rose to power vowing
to crush the unions. As an incumbent now facing his own winter of discontent,
Rishi Sunak arguably has more in common with a weakened James Callaghan,
struggling to show he can get a grip on a country spiralling out of control.
Strikes
have long been seen as most toxic for the Labour party, forcing it into a
wretched choice between disowning the unions and enraging a suffering public.
But in the current climate, the charge that Keir Starmer is “in hock to his
union baron paymasters propping up the Labour party’s coffers” (as the
Conservative party chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, put it) may not have the power it
once did to wound.
For a
start, the public is split on whether closeness to the unions is damaging
Labour’s chances of winning the next election, according to research from
Deltapoll, commissioned by the public affairs agency Millbank Communications,
with a high proportion of “don’t knows” potentially open to changing their
mind. (Leave voters were, however, markedly more anti-union, which may explain
Starmer’s determination to distance himself from the picket lines).
But more
telling, perhaps, is that after Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, only 14% of
voters now regard the Conservatives as broadly competent. If a winter of
strike-induced chaos merges in the public mind with a broader sense that the
government no longer seems to know what it’s doing, then even voters who don’t
think a 15% pay rise is affordable right now may be less inclined to blame
exhausted nurses for trying – and more inclined to blame ministers for failing
– to cut a deal.
After weeks
of the government insisting it wasn’t their place to intervene, Sunak seems to
have recognised that he can’t afford to sit these strikes out. That, at least,
is progress. But for the sake of all those feeling vulnerable this winter,
he’ll have to bring more to the table than cliches and empty threats.
Gaby
Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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