The anger, despair, hardship and sense of being trapped that drove last week’s nurses’ strike, the first in the history of the Royal College of Nursing, with ambulance workers and other large parts of the NHS joining them this Wednesday, did not come out of a clear blue sky. They have been years in the making, as has the industrial action blighting rail, the tube and the post office and those planned in schools and the civil service early in the new year.
For contemporary Tory governments are singularly bad and unsympathetic employers. Although Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been dispatched, their libertarian hostility to the state, to taxes and to the very concept of public endeavour is shared, if less moronically, by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt.
