Winter strikes: who will back down first?

As talks to avert strike action by railway workers and nurses broke down this week, ministers were preparing to enlist the help of the Armed Forces to ease disruption to public services. Some 750 military personnel will be drafted in to replace ambulance workers, who are due to hold their first strike day next week in England and Wales.

A further 600 will be deployed to check passports at airports, where Border Force staff are due to begin a series of eight walkouts starting on 23 December and lasting until the 31st. Passengers at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Cardiff were warned to expect delays.

The head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), Pat Cullen, accused Health Secretary Steve Barclay of “belligerence”, for refusing to discuss pay. The union is seeking a 19% pay rise – five percentage points above the RPI inflation rate – although Cullen has suggested that she is flexible on that.

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Mick Lynch, head of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), said ministers had sabotaged talks by demanding that more trains run without guards. He warned that rail strikes could continue “indefinitely” unless ministers backed down on this issue.

What did the papers say?

The unions are behaving disgracefully, said The Daily Telegraph. The RMT has rejected a “decent pay offer” of a 9% rise over two years because militants are “opposed to modernisation”. Nurses have pushed for a 19% rise that even Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, has implied was unaffordable. Ministers must press ahead with laws to guarantee the provision of minimum service levels. Walkouts by nurses, ambulance drivers – and possibly junior doctors too – are the last thing this country needs, said the Daily Mail. We’ve just gone through hugely damaging lockdowns to “save the NHS”. Is it too much to ask that we revert to “the original arrangement whereby the NHS saves us”?

It’s the Government that’s being inflexible here, said The Guardian. By proposing new antistrike laws that won’t get through the Lords, and would come too late to affect today’s strikes anyway, it’s just trying to look tough. What it should be doing is getting round a table with the unions. “In Scotland, an offer of a 7.5% rise to nurses, some way below that sought by the unions, was enough to avoid strike action.” The Tories mythologise Margaret Thatcher’s toughness, but they forget that she was also a “pragmatist” who, in 1979, gave public sector workers a 25% pay rise to avert a second “winter of discontent”.

“To describe Britain as being in the grip of a wave of public sector strikes isn’t quite accurate,” said Ross Clark in The Spectator. The 115,000 Royal Mail workers who walked out this week are not public sector workers. Nor are the train drivers and guards. They’re all employees of private companies. Clearly, the privatisation of public services hasn’t quelled “union militancy”. What it has done, though, is enable ministers to distance themselves from strikes in an unhelpful way. It was obvious at the TUC’s annual gathering in October that union leaders were spoiling for a fight, said Maggie Pagano on Reaction. Mark Serwotka, boss of the PCSU, told a meeting that he wanted to coordinate national strike action to defeat the Government. Ministers should have been alive to this threat and started either negotiating with the unions over their pay demands or putting the case for why they were wrong. As it is, they’re only reacting now, with token gestures, apparently in the hope that voters blame union leaders for this winter’s disruption and “soon forget the impact of the strikes on their lives”.

The Government is gambling that neither unions nor their members will have the money to keep strike action going much beyond Christmas, said Tom Calver in The Sunday Times. And they could be right. Unions typically provide about £50 a day to their striking members. The RCN, which is in better financial shape than most unions, has a £50m strike fund, so it could potentially pay for a million working days. But with almost half-a-million union members, the money won’t last long.

Holding out against the pay demands may work politically, but it doesn’t “make sense economically”, said Martin Wolf in the FT. The fact is, the pay of many public sector workers, including nurses, is too low. That’s evident from chronic staff shortages: in September, there were 47,496 registered nursing vacancies in the NHS in England. Our “social fabric is fraying”. If the Government isn’t prepared to raise taxes to fix that, it should admit as much. “Letting inflation reduce real pay, while expecting services to be maintained, let alone improve, is plainly dishonest.”

What next?

Ministers are to announce a package of new anti-strike measures in the new year, reports The Times. Among other things, these would increase the threshold for strike action from 40% of all eligible members to 50%; and double the minimum notice period for industrial action from the current 14 days. Hotels, restaurants and pubs expect more than a third of their bookings to be cancelled this month, says The Guardian, which is when hospitality businesses usually ring up a third of their annual sales. It’s estimated that the strikes will cost these businesses about £1.5bn