WHEN the Radio 4 news at 7pm on March 15 could report first on Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Statement, and then secondly note that it had almost been overshadowed by strikes on the day, it’s clear something significant is moving — at least potentially.

The strikes involved a range of unions — Prospect and PCS in government employers across Britain, NEU teachers in England, Aslef and RMT on London Underground, BMA junior doctors in England, and UCU university workers across the UK.

There was an impressive central London march and rally. I attended one called by the Wales TUC in central Cardiff. At the Cardiff rally, there were of course veterans of many previous fights, but there were also numbers of younger trade unionists. Indeed, such was the scale of the action that many on strike would have been doing so for the first time.

The strikes focused on pay, jobs and conditions and the statistics tell us why. TUC research officer Alex Collinson tweeted that if wages had gone up at the same rate as before 2008, they would be £233 a week higher. Hunt’s Budget ushers a period of sustained drops in living standards larger than anything seen since the 1950s.

These were mostly one-day or limited-duration strikes, part of a pattern of a significant rise in action since last summer. It’s the biggest strike wave for perhaps 30 years. Historical comparisons of what official figures term “days lost through strike action” are a basic way of grasping the class struggle — but reveal little about its dynamics.

A memory of the battles, victories and defeats of past decades, going back to the 1970s, is often sadly lacking. Industrial relations academics who chronicled and analysed this have long since been subsumed into university “business studies” departments which give a very different perspective on things.

Outside of papers like the Morning Star, media labour correspondents, who could report on strikes with an accurate knowledge of the forces involved and the likely outcomes, based in part on historical precedent, have gone. Instead, we find reporters who have only the faintest idea of what a trade union is — let alone why and how trade unionists take strike action.

There remain issues about how far victories can be achieved by our side. Here trade union activists and leaders are important.

For example, in the strikes and victories of the 1970s, a body of theory was generated by James Hinton and Richard Hyman about the nature and role of trade union structures. I suspect that work is very largely unknown to activists in the current day. Its history of the present could usefully be recalled and reviewed.

Union leaders have an interest in successful strikes. They attract more members and income and build the union’s strength — important matters. The interest in widening and generalising action at the political level is at best uneven though. Are we talking to the Tories or trying to get the Tories out?

This is not an issue confined to Britain; similar questions arise in France with action on pensions. Is the aim of recent militant demonstrations to get Emmanuel Macron to withdraw the plan to increase the pension age — or is it to get rid of the government altogether? Or perhaps both?

Historically, the point is that these are not new questions, and previous struggles can provide important lessons for the present. At the same time, each new battle is differently configured and needs to be understood and pursued according to the balance of class forces at work. Work and history in progress…

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on Twitter @kmflett.