WHEN the police turned up to Watford Junction station’s RMT picket line, they couldn’t help but notice it exceeded the statutory six people. By about 50. 

The officers duly ordered that only six official pickets could remain, these six obediently took a few steps away; but everyone else stayed where they were. 

What were they playing at, asked the boys and girls in blue? “But we’re just observers, officers!” was the innocent rejoinder.  

This was not their first rodeo.

It was, however, one of the best received, by passengers and passersby alike. When I joined the picket myself, local RMT branch secretary Stewart Cameron told me he’d been overwhelmed by public support: “People have brought us gifts, food, coffees, even money. Today we’ve not had one bad word.”

That, of course, jinxed it a bit: shortly afterwards a man with a hint of the far right about him started shouting that we were “greedy” and “all on £48 grand a year.”

Ah, the famous salary of (some) train drivers, which journalists week in, week out lob at the RMT. Mick Lynch and Eddie Dempsey’s facial expressions are always a joy to behold as they patiently explain, yet again, that most of those they represent are not drivers.

As Cameron says at Watford: “These people here on the picket are ticket office staff, revenue staff, and track workers — on more like £20-£30,000. They work 24/7, seven days a week, 365 days a year to keep Network Rail going. Yet they’re treated like absolute mugs by this government.”

I asked him if it feels to him like an important moment, a sea change of some kind? 

“Definitely — the mood in the country has changed. People are fed up with the rich getting richer and the rest of us poorer. Something has to give.”

Whether we end up with Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak — like a choice between Scylla and Charybdis, or the electric chair and lethal injection — the attacks on our rights to strike will only increase. 

The leadership debates brought us the unedifying spectacle of both candidates giggling excitedly as they rushed to be first to hit the buzzer on whether or not they would curtail it: “YES! Haha!”

If they want to take us back to a world without strikes, they’ll have to wind back through millennia of workers responding to the general bastardry of employers. 

In 1159 BC, the wages of the tomb-builders and craftsmen in Deir el-Medina, Thebes, were over a month late. This wasn’t the first time — the scribe who was effectively their union rep, Amennakht, had had to negotiate food for hungry workers before when salaries hadn’t come.  

Yet it happened again and again; the third time, workers waited 18 days after what should have been payday, then reached a kind of ancient Egyptian “Enough is Enough” moment. 

Shouting: “We are hungry!” they downed tools and marched toward the city, staging a rally at the temple of Ramesses III and what was basically a sit-in at another temple. 

In Britain, strikes are recorded from the 1600s and had probably occurred earlier.

The word was first used in 1768 when sailors struck (removed) sails from their ships as a show of support for demonstrations in London. 

And as night follows day, legislation began to be introduced to make strikes illegal. 

As the Tories drag us back, we have seen Keir Starmer sack frontbencher Sam Tarry, after Tarry appeared on a picket line. 

Starmer has said you can’t hope to be a party of government and stand on a picket line: but hasn’t articulated why.  

The Bryant & May matchwomen’s strike of 1888, and the Great Dock Strike of 1889, were two vital stepping stones on the route to what eventually became the Labour Party. 

A young matchwoman, when asked how her strike had come about, summed it up neatly, in words appropriate to her trade: “It just went like tinder.” 

It was completely unexpected — the matchwomen were considered the “lowest of the low” — as Eastenders, working-class women and “factory lasses,” they were supposed to be powerless, vulnerable and too unintelligent and apolitical to do anything about it. 

You could only think that if you didn’t know them. Most of those writing about them at the time didn’t, except as a “rough set of girls” to be steered clear of on the streets, lest respectable ears should be sullied by bad language or by cheeky banter from women who didn’t seem to acknowledge that these were their “betters.”

What they really were was an intelligent, astute, cool “girl gang” of friends, who survived lives of grinding poverty by standing up for one another with fierce solidarity. 

“They lend their boots and coats. They will give their last crust to a girl out of work,” astonished journalists noted during the strike. This was not the brutish “underclass” of popular lore — these were intelligent working women, who had been politicised by Jewish and Irish backgrounds, and by attendance at the many socialist rallies in London at the time. 

Their solidarity and street smarts carried them through, and they formed the largest union of women and girls in the country at the time. Also key was support from their communities and other groups of workers, who donated, joined their rallies, and went on to unionise in their turn. 

Starmer had previously claimed to support the matchwomen — although, as I wrote at the time, shaky knowledge of working-class history led him to inadvertently celebrate a protest organised by their bosses, rather than their strike against them.  

Back in Watford, Stewart Cameron is optimistic: “We have the CWU and Unite buses coming out too; other unions are joining our fight, and the more that do, the stronger our voice.”

Also on the picket, Phil King of the local trades council agreed: “Unity is the key word.” Dave Barnes of TSSA said: “We haven’t seen this scale of attack on real wages since the 1920s; it’s politically driven and we must respond with the maximum level of solidarity between unions.

“Whether people are in dispute or not they can join a picket line near them to show support — it makes all the difference, and shows us how we win.”

The Enough is Enough movement has been launched in just this spirit; 400,000 signed up in days; I’ve just started a local group and they’re springing up all over Britain. 

EiE aims to address the cost-of-living crisis, already acute and worsening, in all its forms. We’re weeks from winter, but already poverty is driving our fellow citizens to suicide: professionals on the front line have taken to social media to bear witness to what they’re seeing in the fifth-richest country in the world. 

Karim Brohim, a London trauma surgeon, spoke this week about multiple admissions for attempted suicide overnight “…again. ‘Jumped because we can’t afford to eat’. Again.” 

In the responses, police and fire officers and their families agreed: it was now a regular occurrence to pull starving people out of rivers or try to talk them off ledges. 

One firefighter had just pulled the same woman out of a river twice in one night “after the first jump she was put in a cell for a few hours, then went straight back to the river.”

The government may believe us broken and defeated; but on the picket line Stewart Cameron is confident: “Change is coming.”

Perhaps the Tories should remember the Zapatistas who said of their uprising: “If you push people too far, then resistance, revolution, no longer require courage: they become simple necessity.”