With new public sector strikes arriving on an almost weekly basis, ministers and unions are at loggerheads to an extent not seen for decades. But beyond the disputes themselves is another layer of disagreement: what exactly is the government’s plan?
Away from the picket lines there is a fierce parallel battle being waged for public opinion, and to blame the disruption on – depending on your vantage point – bumbling ministers, over-powerful union leaders, or the Labour party.
With junior doctors and teachers joining rail staff, nurses, ambulance crews, highway workers and even the civil service fast stream in considering strikes, gauging public support depends in part on where you look.
Polling suggests nurses enjoy significant public backing, while Mick Lynch, the leader of the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers’ union, conceded on Friday that weeks of rail strikes had caused “a little bit of a dent in public opinion” of his members.
One of the most persistent refrains from unions and opposition parties is a sense of near-wonderment that ministers let so many disputes escalate for so long without efforts to placate staff at an earlier and easier stage, before strike ballots began and battle lines were drawn.
One senior union official said the key factor seemed to be the rapid turnover of ministers – and prime ministers – as the disputes began earlier this year, which meant long-term thinking largely vanished.
“The problem is that you’ve had chaos at the centre, and when you’ve got chaos in No 10, the Treasury wins,” they said.
Once planning for strikes began, ministers’ options had already narrowed: “My best guess is that they decided they couldn’t buy everyone off, as they’d missed the boat. If they wanted to offer something symbolic like a one-off payment they should have done it before the strike ballots.”
Another union source said that with the options for early settlements gone, ministers seemed “set on a war of attrition – they’re banking on public opinion getting fed up with the disruption”.
As a tactic, however, this failed to take account of the way disputes in areas such as the NHS and schools were also connected to staffing levels and morale, and that these pressures were well known to the public: “You can’t fix the NHS or schools without staff. And you also can’t clap people one minute and try to demonise them the next,” the union source said.
One early government strategy was to try to paint Labour as somehow responsible, given the party’s union ties. This has, however, come to little, not least because of the very obvious determination of Keir Starmer and his team to keep out of the weeds of the disputes.
“If the government does have a strategy we’ve not been able to discern one,” a Labour source said. “It all seems to have taken the government off-guard. In contrast, we’ve been very disciplined about not walking into the traps they have tried to set.”
Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said attempts to portray Labour as beholden to unions seemed doomed to fail.
“For one thing, Labour are in opposition,” he said. “If you’re going to say a Labour government is always in hock to the unions, for every voter under 50 the only Labour government they can remember is the Blair-Brown government. And one feature of the Blair-Brown government was the unions moaned about them pretty much the whole time.”
As expected, government officials insist there is a plan, citing the “guiding star” of their approach as reasonableness: acknowledging the plight of workers facing yet another real-terms pay cut, but stressing the need for pay deals to be affordable.
Thus, they say, while ministers this week unveiled plans to effectively bar strikes in several sectors through statutory minimum service levels, they dropped earlier proposals to make strike ballots more difficult.
“This is not union bashing,” a government source said. “We haven’t rushed into a room to start a fight with the unions. We’ve actually been relatively restrained in what is in this bill – we’ve kept it to what we think we need to do to keep the public safe.”
A carrot-and-stick strategy seems to be emerging, centred on the anti-strike laws being combined with an offer to begin early talks on potentially more generous settlements for 2023-24.
Speaking during a visit to a south London school on Friday, Rishi Sunak accepted that the planned law would mean nurses could be sacked for striking, but also said he would be willing to begin talks on next year’s pay as early as Monday.
It is fair to say that unions are sceptical about this new focus on 2023-24, not least because, as one source put it, “given recent history we don’t even know if ministers will still be in the same job in a few months’ time”.
Union officials also say confidence has been hit by what they see as a lack of any real effort by ministers to end strikes. There were claims in December that the government effectively scuppered a possible deal between rail companies and unions by imposing new conditions at the last minute.
Similarly, while ministers have routinely cited the Royal College of Nursing’s 19% pay demand as unaffordable, the union’s general secretary, Pat Cullen, was explicit on Friday that she would accept half this.
All this has left union leaders wondering if ministers privately believe they can gain politically from trying to re-enact a winter of discontent, the strike-dominated period over 1978 and 1979 that helped bring in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.
“That’s the issue the government has: the unions have moved on, but they want to refight the battles of the past,” one union source said. “But I just don’t think you can persuade the public that people like Pat Cullen are dangerous radicals.”
And as Ford notes, such distant references will leave most voters puzzled: “James Callaghan was in power – 1978 was a long time ago. You’d have to be over 60 to have any meaningful memory of it.”
