Our new winter of discontent
My attempt to explain to Italian readers why Britain has become beset by strikes. English original of piece published by La Stampa today
Anyone travelling to Britain in this Christmas and New Year period will have had to accept that their plans would be disrupted. Almost every public service that matters, from train drivers to postal workers to ambulance drivers to nurses to immigration officials has been on strike, all timed to maximise disruption during the Christmas period. If you come, you’d better think twice before trying to take a train, write a letter, have an accident or fall ill.
One aspect of this wave of strikes is notable, however. It is that public opinion in Britain is largely supportive of the strikers, especially the nurses and ambulance drivers, even though the strikes are putting ordinary people’s lives at risk and are certainly disrupting ordinary people’s holidays. In fact, it could be that it will be foreign visitors, from Italy, America and elsewhere, that turn out to be most critical and angry about the disruption, whereas much of the resident public remains angry and critical about the British government and not the strikers.
We British commentators can’t quite make up our minds as to which exact historical period our surge of strikes reminds us of, but we agree that the country has seen nothing like it for decades. Having once been one of Europe’s record-holders, alongside Italy, for the number of days lost to strikes during each year of the 1970s and 1980s, strikes became almost non-existent in the 1990s and into this 21st century. Not any longer. We are striving to be Europe’s record-holder once again.
The preferred historical comparison varies between the early 1970s, when mass strikes occurred as a reaction to the inflation caused by the 1973 energy crisis; 1978-79 when a weakened and fragile Labour government was hit by what came to be known, using a phrase from Shakespeare, as “the winter of discontent”, which led to the election victory of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in May 1979; or the fierce battles between Mrs Thatcher and the coal miners and other trade unions in 1984-85 as she fought to break the unions’ power.
My preference is for the “winter of discontent” of 1978-79, because today’s strikes too are happening in winter but also because they are again directed against a weakened and fragile government, this time a Conservative one. In fact, the weakened nature of the Conservative government, after 12 years in power and three different prime ministers during 2022, is one of the factors that is provoking these strikes.
The big difference between today and any of the big periods of strikes in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s is that whereas in those years the main strikes were in coal mines and car factories this time the strikes have spread to the National Health Service, with nurses and ambulance drivers holding the first strikes in the health service’s 75-year history.
When miners and car workers went on strike the country was divided between those in the working classes who supported them, and many others, chiefly in service industries, who did not. Now, with the strikes almost entirely focused on the public sector, or sectors like railways which are regulated and subsidised by the government, public opinion is reacting very differently. So far, it is supportive, particularly of low-paid strikers such as nurses, postal workers and ambulance drivers, but even tolerant of the higher-paid train drivers.
The key question, nonetheless, is why these strikes are happening more widely in Britain than in other European countries. We all share a cost-of-living crisis, we all share inflation at an annual rate of 10% or more, and we all have governments that are struggling to deal with huge public debts following the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine.
Certainly, Britain’s economic situation has become one of the weakest in Western Europe. Britain is the only one of the “G7” group of advanced countries whose GDP remains smaller than it was in 2019 before the pandemic began. Like in Italy, household incomes after adjusting for inflation have been falling for the past decade. Thanks to Brexit, business investment has fallen as our trade with our former EU partners has shrunk.
At the same time, Britain’s rate of unemployment, at 3.7% of the workforce, is low by historical standards, and is about half the rate in Italy. Alongside that low unemployment, we have seen quite a large number of people, probably more than half a million, leave the workforce since 2019 for reasons connected with sickness, often ‘long Covid’ but also other ailments, as well as taking early retirement.
This combination of a weak economy, falling household incomes and labour scarcity has encouraged the public sector unions to launch these strikes. Many public sector workers are among the lowest paid workers in Britain. Yet labour scarcity suggests to them that they deserve higher pay, and some argue that higher public sector pay would also attract some people back into the workforce.
Most important of all, however, is the fact that the government is weak and fragile. It is the government that, ultimately, is the employer with whom all these public sector unions must negotiate. The government is pleading poverty, but unions know very well that the weak state of Britain’s public finances is largely attributable to the Conservative Party itself, because of the low economic growth resulting from Brexit and, above all, because of the damaging experiment of the 45-day prime ministership of Liz Truss in September.
So the strikers are, in effect, daring the Conservative Party to resist their pay demands and by doing so to become even more unpopular and perhaps to collapse and face a disastrous general election some time in 2023. The strikers, especially nurses, know that the public believes they are badly under-paid, and believes that the work done in the NHS during the pandemic deserves the reward of higher wages. The fact that higher wages might have to be paid for by higher taxation does not seem to have discouraged public support.
For the time being, the bet looks like a good one. Either the Conservatives will make concessions which lead to higher pay, or there will be a political crisis leading to a general election, and a new Labour government will then deliver higher public sector pay. Let us hope, however, that lives are not lost unnecessarily in the meantime.