With strikes now spreading across the public sector, including a historic, first-time strike action by the Royal College of Nurses, political questions around union activity are being forced open in a way that we have not seen in British politics for three decades.
Not since the major union defeats of the 1980s have trade unions struck on this scale in Britain. That long period of industrial calm, when for decades strikes became almost unknown in this country, seems to have left the Conservative government – already riven with political divisions – unable to think and act strategically against collective action by hundreds of thousands of determined public sector workers.
The Tories, instead, have made a bad situation for themselves appreciably worse through thoughtless belligerence. Despite their increasingly ferocious press campaign against the strikes and the unions, they are a long way from any victory.
