It is 14 long months since the first rail strikes inaugurated a tsunami of industrial action across Britain’s public sector, and it still isn’t over. With doctors—senior and junior—taking it in turns to walk out, and yet more rail stoppages imminent, rolling strikes have become endemic, part of a state of national dysfunction alongside Brexit and the cost-of-living crisis.
In reality, the worst of the strikes are now over, with the settlement of the mass teachers’ and nurses’ actions. But nearly four million working days have been lost to industrial action over the last year—the highest figure since the 1980s—and the legacy will be as toxic as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. It will only worsen the longer the tail of unresolved disputes persists, including university lecturer strikes with unmarked exam papers and undeclared grades.
Apart from all the patients untreated, pupils untaught, and passengers untravelled, the most glaring casualty of the strikes is likely to be Rishi Sunak, who presided over most of them. Like Jim Callaghan in the “winter of discontent” of 1978-9, Sunak has appeared inept, vacillating and out of touch. With the teachers and nurses, he ended up granting pay settlements this summer which could have resolved the disputes months earlier.
Sunak thought that acting tough would make him another Thatcher. But he was up against hospital matrons, not Arthur Scargill. And with inflation racing way ahead of public sector pay, after a decade of austerity which had squeezed that pay in real terms, he was taking on forces of reason, not unreason.
It was particularly crass for Sunak to allow NHS strikes to roll on given that cutting NHS waiting lists are one of his five key pledges for 2023. Now hospital waiting lists are at their highest level ever, and at 7.6m, three times the level inherited by the Tories from Labour in 2010. The government, not the unions, has got most of the public blame for the endless disruption. The situation is in some ways even worse for Sunak than for Callaghan, for at least in the late seventies government and unions shared the opprobrium.
Beyond the immediate party political repercussions, the strikes have injected a poison into the body politic which may take years to overcome.
The major strikes of the 1970s and 1980s—across mining, municipal government, manufacturing industry and schools—left a legacy of bitterness and desolation to all they touched. The mining industry was eradicated faster and more brutally than it would otherwise have been. Britain’s manufacturing industry was left uncompetitive and much of it wiped out. Municipal government, the rail industry and the comprehensive school system took decades to reform into services generally regarded as high quality. Only in the very low-strike, high-growth Blair years was the toxicity of the previous generation of industrial strife fully overcome.
The last year’s strikes have occurred overwhelmingly in the public sector. Partly this is because relative pay has fallen most in the public sector, even before the tight below-inflation settlements of the last year. Partly it is because the public sector is the only bastion of a trade union movement half the size of 1979. (The railway system has since Covid been in the public sector to all intents and purposes). It would be a calamity if it now takes years to restore a culture of continuous reform and improvement across the NHS and public services more broadly.
Public service culture and contentment is partly about salaries and resources. Yet it is also about shared missions and constructive leadership.
If inflation reduces sharply in the coming year, and public sector pay review bodies are allowed by this and the next government to gradually increase salaries in real terms, the immediate economic causes of the present discontent may be ameliorated. But it will take a new generation of leaders—including a new prime minister and ministers—before public service once again becomes a mission which is inspired, not impeded, by its leaders.
