More strikes are coming, with 100,000 civil servants due to strike on 1 February. For 18 days across February and March, 150 UK universities will be shut down by University and College Union action. Last week, 45,000 junior doctors began voting on strike action. They will join transport workers, nurses, ambulance workers and a number of other public and private professionals – an objection of strikers, to suggest a collective noun.
Their caricatures have already been vividly painted – the “fat cat” trade union leaders, the entitled workers, the uncaring healthcare professionals who are taking advantage of bad times to snatch a higher paycheck; all at the expense of small businesses and poorly patients. These are compelling portrayals. Life is already hard, and those making it immediately and practically harder are easier to blame than those making it abstractly so. A paramedic who refuses to get in their ambulance is a more visible villain than a blur of ministers who have passed policies over the years that have compelled that worker to strike.
But through the fog of disruption and crisis made worse by industrial action, something is emerging that is posing a potent counterargument to the anti-strike sentiment so deeply embedded both in British political culture and legislation. Strikes have come at a time when the old regime is dying, but another has not yet taken its place – now is the time of monsters, as the quote goes. But it could also be a time of breakthrough.
When it comes to offering solutions to the growing deadlock with the nation’s workers, we have a vacuum. The government is a mardy mess, veering between long periods of absence and sudden bursts of pugnaciousness. Labour, on the other hand, takes the moral high ground, but is absent on the actual ground. Starmer rightly points out that the nurses’ strike is a “badge of shame” for the government, but then bans frontbench Labour MPs from showing active support for the strikes.
Both the government’s proposed anti-strike legislation and Labour’s caution in throwing its weight behind industrial action are based on the same belief: that strikes are unpopular. And maybe in normal times they are. But these are not normal times. Strikes can be made popular if politicians lack the charisma or mandate to effectively vilify strikers, and when an economic crisis runs so deep that a class consciousness develops. Public support for the ability to strike in most professions has grown since June last year. Between Tory menace and Labour caution, a large space has emerged that is up for grabs.
That space has resulted in a strange displacement within British politics. Striking workers and their representatives are describing, with the detail and passion that is missing from our politicians’ addresses, the dire reality facing the country and what a hopeful future would look like. Last week, a statement written by the co-chair of the BMA East of England regional junior doctor committee referred rousingly to his fellow workers in the NHS and elsewhere as “the backbone of this country. We drive your ambulances, we sweep your roads, we stock your shelves, we nurse you back to good health. We’re the source of any prosperity, any trade, any security.”
And it’s not all flourishes of rhetoric. Striking workers are also correctly identifying the guilty parties in a way that sometimes feels almost like a hallucination, so unaccustomed are we to hearing these arguments made in the political sphere. As the government robotically blames the pandemic and the war in Ukraine for almost everything, and Labour in turn blames the government, striking workers are talking about all the contextual unmentionables – extractive private bosses, an ideological legacy of deregulation and defunding, and a rightwing media that essentially functions as a political propaganda arm.
Giving evidence to the transport select committee last week, the RMT general secretary, Mick Lynch, hit many of these notes, pointing out that even before the railway strikes service was dire, that the deadlock is because of the government, that the media has waged a campaign against strikers, and that, in the face-off with workers, the Conservatives should no longer assume they are the more popular protagonist by default.
These notes are made even more resonant by the extent of the economic crisis. All but a small minority are feeling the pinch, and know someone who has it harder. There are simply too many people working in these industries or connected with someone who does for the government line to stick. Accounts of professional lives transformed into a kind of daily torture are all around us. In my own extended family, one NHS worker reports such horrors that we are becoming concerned for their mental health, and we would not only support but encourage some strike action to protect their mind and body.
But even with a political vacuum and more popular empathy than expected for industrial action, the kind of solidarity that will result in a breakthrough that would properly address pay and conditions still seems fractured. The profile of work in this country – itself a legacy of successful union busting – is a mix of private, public, non-unionised and zero hours, meaning there can be no central coordination or messaging to the public.
The media is broadly unsympathetic, placing constant pressure on popular support, and there is little to connect broad grassroots campaigns (such as Enough is Enough) with union leadership in the ways that could bring about a general strike. The risk is then that the strikers’ goals become more fragmented and inconsistent over time, and the image the government wants to portray – that of a crisis-ridden country betrayed by its workers – grows more persuasive.
Whether that changes depends on the momentum and connections striking workers manage to whip up over the next few weeks, and how sustained the cost of living crisis turns out to be. They have a shot. The irony is that both left and right are betting heavily on patriotism and a national sense of belonging to supplement their policy shortcomings, but have serviced them poorly with empty sloganeering, silly symbolism and culture wars.
When there are no real solutions on offer, that unfulfilled sense of common cause can become welded in a furnace of frustration, and then used as a tool to hammer politicians. For too long, British politics has successfully operated on the principle that there is more distance between the blessed and the unfortunate than there is proximity; that we don’t all share the same goals as immigrants, striking workers and people who need benefits and housing, because they are somehow responsible for their misfortune. It’s a powerful illusion. But when there are more losers than winners, it could be an illusion that is ripe for piercing.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
