THIS month marked four years since the defeat of the most serious challenge to British capitalism in decades — Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership.

The coming year marks four decades since the start of the great miners’ strike of 1984-85, whose defeat signalled the decisive victory of Thatcher’s neoliberal project in Britain, prompting a sharp acceleration of her government’s privatisation drive (we lost public control of British Telecom, British Aerospace, British Petroleum, British Gas, British Steel, British Airways, Rolls-Royce and, at the tail-end of her decade in power, the municipally owned water and electricity boards).

Defeat of the miners ushered in a long period of decline for unions. There are less than half as many trade union members in Britain now as in 1980; less than a quarter of workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements, compared to more than half in 1980; the number and size of strikes declined too.

Over the last 18 months, that pattern has begun to change. 2022 saw more working days lost to strike action across the country than any year since 1989, though the 2.4 million days lost were still way short of the 4.1 million of 1989, let alone the 29.5 million days of 1979.

When union leaders like Sharon Graham or Mick Lynch talk of the labour movement being “reborn” or the working class being “back,” the reference is to reversing that 40-year retreat and building a movement as formidable as it was at its 1970s to ’80s peak.

Corbynism had a similar historical perspective, promoting a break not just with the Conservative government we had, but with the entire neoliberal period. 

It was not alone. As the aftershocks of the world financial meltdown of 2007-8 shattered confidence in the status quo, parallel movements erupted in France (France Unbowed), Spain (Podemos), Greece (Syriza), the United States (led by Bernie Sanders) and other countries; in Chile, huge street protests at the end of the 2010s could declare that “neoliberalism was born in Chile and will die in Chile” because the marketising consensus of Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan did look to be coming apart everywhere.

All the issues that gave birth to these movements — worsening inequality, growing poverty and insecurity for working and even “middle-class” people in the developed world, tangible deterioration in the quality and efficiency of public services and the patent inability of our political system to confront existential crises like climate change — loom larger than ever today, but coherent mass movements to change the system have declined or disappeared.

Britain’s strike wave hasn’t changed that, which isn’t to underestimate the extent to which it has changed Britain. 

If the movement is still much weaker than 40 years ago, its advance over the last 18 months is clear. The government was forced to raise its pay offer across the public sector after repeated national strikes. Unions showed they could beat high participation thresholds in national ballots designed specifically to stop those strikes.

Across the private sector and in local government too, the number of disputes has multiplied and victories have been common enough that, in the face of concerted government and Bank of England efforts to hold wages down, average pay rises finally caught up with consumer price index inflation (CPI) in the summer. 

Nobody would claim this was a decisive triumph for workers: CPI excludes housing costs and therefore seriously underestimates the real rate of inflation, pay awards across most of the public sector remained below inflation, and with real-terms incomes having fallen for 15 years, we have only slowed, not reversed, the fall in living standards. 

But it is a real achievement, representing a real difference made to the lives of millions of families because their unions forced more money out of employers. They can use the gains of the last year to secure further gains in the next: and a worker who won a better pay rise because they struck in 2023 will be more likely to strike again in 2024.

But it has also been clear since the start of the strike wave that what unions can achieve is limited politically. The neoliberal consensus is that public services should either be privatised outright, or reduced to publicly commissioned services from the private sector: any activity which does not turn a profit for a capitalist is useless. 

Labour, with its outright refusal to return utilities or services to public hands and its determination to further embed private-sector provision in the NHS, is as much part of that consensus as the Tories, and has worked hard since 2020 to assure the crooked elite who profit from Britain’s dysfunctional economy that nothing will change if it is elected.

That places severe constraints on what can be achieved in public services or local government. Since workers’ bargaining power depends on what other workers are earning, Labour’s commitment to fiscal austerity and Bank of England orthodoxy will act to repress wages across the economy, just as the current Tory government’s does.

So while the TUC talks often about the need for political change, the reality is that this is not currently on the table, however close a general election may be.

A more direct instance of politics intervening to foil union aspirations is the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act. 

The special TUC Congress called earlier this month committed unions to defy the new law and to mobilise an emergency demonstration as soon as any union or member is attacked through it: but making this a reality depends on work now, ensuring workers understand the implications of the law — which in many sectors effectively bans strikes, and would have prevented the very strikes through which members won raises this year — and the need to stand together when employers wield it, whoever they wield it against.

The fundraising and co-ordination required to deliver whole-movement resistance to the anti-strike law should be fertile ground for the beginnings of a campaign to sweep away all the anti-union laws, especially those which prevent solidarity action with other workers. Such action is deployed to great effect currently in Sweden against Tesla, but would be illegal for workers over here. 

While there will be pressure in an election year to rally round Labour despite its dismal non-offer for government, the left must build pressure in the opposite direction. We need to maximise our demands of the Labour Party, put it on notice that unless it changes its tune on public services it will face fresh waves of strikes — and use a mass campaign against the anti-union laws to put its representatives (and non-Labour politicians) under the spotlight.

That might seem ambitious given Labour’s commanding poll lead, but recent months have seen cracks open in the Starmer monolith.

Morning Star political reporter Andrew Murray, a senior adviser to Corbyn when the latter led Labour, wrote tellingly of the Corbyn movement’s weakness back in June: “The beleaguered parliamentary left needed something like a combination of the strike wave of the last 12 months and the anti-war movement at its 2002-4 peak to adequately back it up.”

Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza has provoked an explosion of anti-war feeling. 

The largest national demos have begun to approach the enormous sizes reached in 2003, when the biggest march in British history took place against the war in Iraq. If anything, the plethora of local demos, fundraisers and solidarity vigils is even greater: the movement for peace in Palestine has tremendous reach.

Labour’s refusal to call for a Gaza ceasefire has enraged whole communities, prompting the biggest parliamentary revolt since Starmer took over, an exodus of councillors and the prospect of serious challenges to Labour in a number of constituencies. 

As the Morning Star has argued, it opens up questions beyond the immediate and urgent one of peace in Palestine. It has the potential to rupture the enforced consensus on foreign policy built under Starmer through bullying and threats, and rejuvenate anti-imperialist politics. 

The organisation and success of the demos has proved how essential the experienced, serious anti-imperialism of solidarity organisations and peace campaigns like CND and Stop the War remain. The last in particular has faced a disgraceful campaign of smears and no-platforming, beginning on the Labour right but echoed in parts of the unions and by some left personalities, which must now be rolled back, its centrality to a militant left reasserted.

Insultingly low pay offers for the next year are already emerging from ministers, notably in education. The strike wave must continue to spread: and it will now undoubtedly provoke direct clashes with the state because of the new law.

The Palestine demonstrations must continue too, with Israel accelerating its killing spree over the Christmas period and promising war for months to come. The next major national demonstration is on January 13.

With the strike wave and the peace movement, what’s missing is what we had from 2015-20: a mass movement for socialism with a prominent parliamentary wing. But the conditions to build one are now taking shape.