As union militants mobilise, Rishi Sunak has little time to avoid the same fate as Ted Heath

Voters might have some sympathy for a tougher approach, but it is hard to avert strikes when inflation is high

UPostal workers are already at it, as are Scottish teachers. Joining the queue are firefighters, border officials and university lecturers

ntil about 40 years ago, one of the most distressing features of life in Britain was that everyone was forced to know who the trade union bosses were. They were constantly on television – often fat, often chain-smoking, always men, with names like Ken or Len, Don or Ron, Mick or Vic.

The more unprofitable their industry or unproductive their public service, the more money they demanded. Their favoured phrases – “industrial action” and “work to rule” – carried almost the opposite of their natural and ordinary meaning. “Industrial action” meant striking; “working to rule” meant working only a tiny little bit.

These men were on the telly because, to an alarming degree, they governed Britain. The Labour Party was (and still theoretically is) half of the two-headed “Labour movement”, the parliamentary arm of the organised, unionised working class. The idea was that the two heads, being better than one, would co-operate for the common economic good. The actual result was a sharp decline in prosperity, competitiveness and, increasingly, civil peace. For the public, it meant endless inconvenience.

It was no better, at first, under the Conservatives. Ted Heath promised to break trade union power, but failed, both in his reforms of labour law and politically. He called the February 1974 election over the issue, and lost.

Margaret Thatcher’s most incontestable achievement was that she stopped all this. In 1979, when she first came into office, Britain lost 29.4million working days to strikes. In 1990, when she left, the figure was fewer than two million. After the defeat of Arthur Scargill’s miners’ union in 1985, entire news bulletins could pass without seeing a single union leader on the screen. The sum of human happiness vastly increased – not only in our living rooms but also in our workplaces.

After more than 12 years in office, the Tories now risk the fate of Heath. This week, nurses announced they will break their own strong moral tradition by striking, beginning with a couple of days off next month. Their stonking pay demand – 19 per cent – is pure 1970s.

The railway unions, traditionally among the worst in our industrial landscape and currently led by Mick Lynch, an admirer of Vladimir Putin, are upping their strike rate: four more striking days till Christmas.

Postal workers are already at it, as are Scottish teachers. Joining the queue are firefighters, border officials and even (laughably unpowerful and unpopular) university lecturers.

My guess is that, at present, Mr Lynch is the only union boss of whom millions have heard, but soon we shall become all too familiar with Pat Cullen (the Royal College of Nursing), Ian Murray (Fire Brigades Union) and a dozen more.

The primary cause of the return of strikes is inflation, not union militancy. If the value of the money you earn goes into sharp decline, you naturally seek to increase the total sum. If you work in the private sector, however, your desire to strike is tempered by the knowledge that you might lose out to the competition. No such fear deters the monopoly public sector. Its workers can make life miserable for their fellow citizens with almost no chance of losing their jobs as a result.

Inflation infects the whole country with Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). This, in turn, alters politics. Wise governments try to stay out of pay disputes; but since inflation applies to all citizens and is largely the product of government and central-bank action or negligence, the clamour always grows for governments to ensure “fairness”. From this arises “comparability”, a theology of wage justice. The effect is invariably to put up wages without regard to affordability.

Prices and incomes policies were invented to cure the disease by suppressing the symptoms. This fails over time. The hunt for fairness always loses out to FOMO. After initial calm, the process totters, strikes redouble. You end up with the Winter of Discontent of 1978-9 which helped Mrs Thatcher get Labour out.

This week, Rishi Sunak’s new Transport Secretary, Mark Harper, invited Mick Lynch to his department’s offices, no doubt hoping to break the impasse. This allowed Mr Lynch, now wearing a tie, to look suddenly powerful and responsible on the steps of the department and to mock the “bellicose nonsense” of Mr Harper’s predecessor, Grant Shapps, without having to concede anything. I’m afraid it felt dreadfully 1970s to me.

Some in the Government want a tougher approach. In the case of the nurses, for example, they argue that the public, who have suffered so much from the disruption of Covid-19 and are now waiting in their millions for delayed scans, operations and procedures, should not be made to put up with further nonsense. The remarkable slowness of public services and civil servants to return to full work after Covid is recent testimony to how much they are protected from the rigours of hard times when compared with their private-sector counterparts. It has made public-sector workers unpopular.

In apportioning sympathy, voters compare their own plight with that of those who strike. They may have clapped the NHS at the time, but now they know how much its inefficiency is contributing to their ill health. Strikes are flatly incompatible with the ethos of “caring” on which it is supposedly founded. Public patience is exhausted.

There is much in this analysis, and also in the plain fact, constantly reiterated by Mr Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, that taxpayers are already bled dry. Their sudden ascendancy is based on the idea that they are prepared to tell some hard truths. These do need telling in the present wage round.

Unlike in the early 1980s, however, it may be hard to drive a wedge between union members and their overmighty, unrepresentative union bosses. The Thatcher laws entrenched rights against them. Union members may concentrate their ill feeling, after so many recent difficulties, on the Government. If it waves a big stick but is too weak to use it, then it gets the worst of both worlds.

There is talk, too, of anti-union legislation. One idea, so far unimplemented, is a law to insist on maintaining “minimum service levels” during public-sector strikes. This sounds more hopeful than practical. How would it be enforced? It might be more fruitful to attack the way trade-union membership is unjustly entrenched in many public services; but there is no known reform just now which has the strong political potential of secret ballots for union elections or ending secondary picketing in 1970s Britain.

Mr Sunak has not yet led on public-sector wages and strikes. Sir Keir Starmer could get there first. He might be less inhibited than was Labour in the 1980s about attacking trade union excesses. It is true that Labour literally cannot afford to break with the unions – the money is too big – but Sir Keir has already moved his party a good way towards not outspending the Tories. He would love to go into the next election contrasting Sunak the profligate with Starmer the prudent.

The best advantage Mr Sunak has over his predecessors in pre-thatcher Britain is that the trade union movement remains disaggregated. The great collective solidarity of mass memberships, and with it the power to co-ordinate for political ends, has not returned. But while no one was paying attention because the Tories were having yet another leadership battle, the TUC passed a resolution for just that.

Mr Sunak has little time to avoid the fate of Heath and little opportunity to grab the success of Thatcher.