Winter strikes: who will back down first?
The Government is gambling that unions will not have the money to keep strike action going much beyond Christmas

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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Pirro: Trump turns to another loyalist
Feature Trump appoints Jeanine Pirro, a 2020 election denier, as U.S. attorney
-
Hate pays: Making $770K from a racist rant
Feature A Minnesota mom made $770,000 after being caught on camera calling a 5-year-old boy a racial slur
-
Medicaid: Will millions lose coverage?
Feature House Republicans have proposed a plan to cut Medicaid coverage for millions to help fund the GOP's tax cuts
-
The military: Hegseth's escalating culture war
Feature The Pentagon is ordering military academies to purge their libraries of books on race, gender, and discrimination
-
U.S. hits brakes on trade war with China
Feature The Trump administration agreed to a 90-day tariff pause with China
-
Trump defends $400M jet gift on Mideast tour
Feature Trump's Middle East tour sparks alarm over plan to turn the Qatari jet into an Air Force One
-
To ban or not to ban AfD? German democracy at a crossroads
Talking Point Germany's domestic intelligence agency has officially designated the country's main opposition party a right-wing extremist group
-
Is Starmer's plan to send migrants overseas Rwanda 2.0?
Today's Big Question Failed asylum seekers could be removed to Balkan nations under new government plans