“He’s a communist. He’s antichrist. He’s against God,” shouts a protester as Mick Lynch and the rest of the RMT delegation arrive for talks. “Blimey,” says Lynch, sad eyes a-twinkle. “You need to wake up, young man!” adds the protester. “At least he called me young,” says Lynch. You need a thick skin to be a union leader in 2023.
Strike: Inside the Unions profiles three senior union figures as a winter of discontent blossoms into a spring of something worse. I never thought I’d see the day: since Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985, it has seemed scarcely credible that organised labour could galvanise widespread industrial action, still less command public support for it.
