THE Tories are becoming bolder in their attacks on the rights of trade union members, the right to strike and the general right to protest. It is vital for the future of this country and for ordinary people that these attacks are halted and reversed.

This Monday May 22 the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill comes back to the House of Commons. The TUC has called a protest outside Parliament for that evening. It deserves to be strongly supported.

The economic backdrop remains bleak. Even if double-digit inflation does fall back, prices will still be rising rapidly. The bulk of the population faces increasing misery for a long time to come. This is not an act of god or a product of unforeseeable events.

This country is the worst in the G7 in terms of growth, both since before the pandemic began and, according to IMF and other forecasters, it will be over the next two years to come.

All of this is a product of government policy. It is a deliberate and conscious attempt to drive down living standards and wages to reduce the labour share of national income — to benefit big business.

This is the backdrop to this Bill and to all the efforts to curb union participation and militancy, as well as other measures to prevent protest. The Public Order Act is a draconian piece of legislation, one in a long line of measures to curb fundamental rights of assembly, protest and even to vote.

We saw at the time of the coronation how authoritarian these measures are. They effectively allow ministerial direction to curb protests from people the government does not agree with. They should be seen as part of an overall package of increasing authoritarianism to curb protest, dissent and strikes.

It is the unions that have been on strike and the many who continue to take industrial action who are the big battalions in the fight against this rotten government and its policies.

The strike wave has been extraordinary in its scope and duration; it is claimed elsewhere that it is already over after some unions have settled — do not believe that for a second.

The inertia of dwindling industrial action over decades has been decisively broken. At the same time the living standards of the bulk of the population will continue to decline for some time to come, with incomes likely to decline further in real terms.

A recent report from the Resolution Foundation shows that the actual inflation rate for poorer households is about 3 per cent higher than the official level from the Office for National Statistics. This is because low-income households spend much more of their incomes on items such as food and energy.

But another crucial factor is that the strikes have worked, and union members (and others) know it.

It is quite true that most settlements have not kept pace with inflation, which represents another blow to living standards.

Many union members and activists seem to be unhappy with those outcomes. Inevitably there will be debates within the unions about whether, or in what ways, more could have been achieved, and can be in future.

What is certain, though, is that the strikes worked. They achieved far better outcomes for union members than would otherwise have been the case.

This is most obvious in the public sector, where the government, as the largest employer in the country by far, has been attempting to set a “going rate” against the interests of all workers.

The initial government offer was generally 2 per cent and/or a demand that the settlements were in line with the recommendations of the public-sector pay review bodies.

As a result, there emerged a very large gap between the growth in the pay of the public and private sectors, where a combination of low unemployment, skills shortages and some strike action pushed up pay.

That public versus private-sector pay gap widened to well over 6 per cent last year. Now it has narrowed to less than 1 per cent. At the same time, the average growth in public-sector wages has reached 5.6 per cent for the first quarter of this year.

This is still well below the rate of inflation, but it is far above the government’s various offers to union members in the public sector — so the strikes are working.

Driving down wages is the centrepiece of the government’s entire economic and political strategy. But of course, it is not the only component of it.

Public services as a whole are being run into the ground and starved of funds. Via the tax system, there is a huge transfer of resources to big business and the rich, which has always been central to austerity policies.

And, as a distraction from the effects of its own terrible policies, the government adopts a divide-and-rule approach in stirring up what it describes as “the culture wars.”

These look much more like old-fashioned policies promoting racism, anti-migrant sentiment, misogyny and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. They are central to the government’s strategy to prevent the emergence of unity among workers — and between workers and all those facing discrimination and oppression.

It is completely right that the left struggles for that unity and against division and places the struggles against oppression at the heart of everything in its entire outlook. Solidarity must be our response to all those fighting this government.

On the strike Bill, there is no prospect of overturning it and blocking it from becoming law now. If there is only Monday’s protest, it would be a futile gesture. Instead, we must use it as a stepping stone for an increase in campaigning against all the anti-strike legislation and all the authoritarian anti-civil rights laws.

In a green paper published last October, Labour set out its plans to restore collective bargaining, with binding rights for unions and their members. There are since reports that there is now an intention by some in the National Policy Forum to exclude “large parts of the economy” from those rights. This should be strongly resisted: rights are universal or they are not really rights at all.

The right to strike has always been a key weapon in the fight for better living standards as well as for social justice. We cannot — and must not — allow this generation to be the one that allowed that right to be removed.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.