IN THE last weeks of December 2022, Britain saw strike action by over a million workers.

Trade unions representing posties, university lecturers, rail workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, driving examiners, bus drivers, staff in the UK Border Force and at the Highways and Environment Agencies have all taken industrial action in concert with each other. 

The defiant mood of striking workers standing on picket lines in sub-zero temperatures has been reinforced by a sense that they are part of a swelling movement across Britain. The organised working class is leading a national debate over what kind of a society we want to live in. 

Every news and current affairs outlet, however reactionary its editorial line, has had to devote significant coverage to the crises of food, energy and housing poverty afflicting Britain’s population.

Attempts by inept Tory media manipulators to divert public concern into anger towards illegal migrants, striking nurses, or Harry and Meghan all failed to dent the sense of impending democratic crisis created by a Prime Minister chosen by bankers, and a supine leader of the opposition. 

Significantly, public opinion does not appear to have been fooled by the barrage of government- and employer-inspired attack lines spouted by press and media commentators.

Last Tuesday, when the BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s Mishal Hussein spent almost her entire interview with RMT’s Mick Lynch asking him how much money striking RMT members were losing in wages — a media line formulated and proposed by a government press officer — Mick replied: “Do you want to make a donation to our strike fund? You’re just parroting the most right-wing lines you can find from The Daily Mail and The Sun.”

In a Twitter poll by finance journalist Martin Lewis on Tuesday December 13, over 75 per cent of 235,109 respondents supported strike action by rail workers, bus drivers, Royal Mail workers, nurses, highways workers and baggage handlers — all key public-facing services. 

Numerous videos circulating on social media show CWU members walking en masse to join RMT picket lines and tens of thousands of trade unionists from dozens of unions joined members of the Royal College of Nursing taking strike action in England and Wales for the first time in their history. 

What we are seeing is a revival of class consciousness expressed through the current strike wave.

From relatively isolated beginnings in the springtime of 2022, groups of workers organised industrially across sectors such as railways, postal services, buses and London Underground as well as major ports such as Felixstowe and Liverpool broke the passivity that had been imposed by 18 months of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic and reasserted trade union strength and militancy through a series of national and sectoral strikes.

Trade union consciousness famously has its limitations. Under the assault on living standards by the current Tory government, which has fuelled inflationary pressures, encouraging and condoning profiteering by oil and gas corporations and banks in the City of London, the sense of a beleaguered working class facing double-digit inflation in food, rents and energy prices is that ordinary people are under total attack.

Workers are under attack at the workplace from employers seeking to impose inferior terms and conditions and pay cuts through “fire and rehire” — or in the case of P&O Ferries “fire and replace” — but also in their domestic and social life where consumer price hikes and further cuts to public services are driving in-work poverty.

The current industrial disputes confront both employers’ desire to “reset” industrial relations in the post-Covid world, by tearing up collective agreements in order to manage in a new way, and the 2 per cent public-sector pay cap imposed by Rishi Sunak as Chancellor of the Exchequer, reinforced by his successor Jeremy Hunt.

It is the linking up of the existing strike actions with the demand of working people for housing, fuel, food and decent work that holds the key to rebuilding class consciousness in Britain today.

Further industrial action ballots are currently underway by the fire and rescue workers’ union (FBU) and the two largest teachers’ unions in England and Wales (NEU and NASUWT), the results of which will be announced in January.

However, the scale and number of industrial disputes currently taking place should not distract anyone from the strategy of the Sunak government which is to legislate to make strike action effectively unlawful in Britain by this time next year. 

The list of further bans on strike action and extensions of the most restrictive anti-union laws in the Western world have been covered previously in the Morning Star by Keith Ewing and John Hendy.

What is needed now is an achievable and effective strategy to draw together the burgeoning trade union disputes and to combine them with popular movements yet to be born to oppose the Tory government’s existential attack on the democratic rights of people to protest and for workers to withdraw their labour. 

A united front of trade unions currently confronting the Tory government’s public-sector pay cap and stated agenda to make strike action unlawful in Britain would represent “the most advanced and favourable way to go forward to a new and progressive stage of working-class political development,” to quote Palme Dutt, cited in Andrew Murray’s Eyes Left column in this week’s Star.

All trade unionists should be urgent discussing through their democratic structures the viability of building such a united front with other labour movement and campaign organisations fighting Tory austerity and authoritarianism in the coming days.