The strength of the trade union movement, the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote, cannot be fully understood by looking at curves on a graph that show membership. Instead, there are “jumps,” “leaps” and “explosions” in activity. For him, these unpredictable peaks and sudden moments of upsurge are produced by “accumulations of inflammable material which only ignite periodically, as it were under compression”.
Britain is experiencing a moment of ignition right now. Welcome to what many have already dubbed “hot strike summer”.
