It’s time to hold Margaret Thatcher responsible for the rolling wave of strikes that have crippled the UK in the last 12 months. In Paris the demonstrations against President Macron’s

pension reform have seen hundreds of thousands on the streets, egged on by far Left and far Right leaders who want to see Macron brought down. These protests have at times turned very

violent. The British strike wave, by contrast, has been decorous in action with picket line arrests unknown. But they are far more damaging to Rishi Sunak than the strikes in France are to

Emmanuel Macron. In the second half of 2022, Britain lost 2,471,000 days of productive work due to strikes. This is the highest level since the 1980s, in the era of all-out war between Mrs

“junior” though they are men and women who can be aged 40 or over, registrars and other medics dealing in hospitals with most cases of illness or surgery, are lectured about their 35% pay

demand. They say that this is necessary to restore their purchasing power to where it was in 2010, before the Conservative-LibDem coalition government embraced the ideology of “austerity”

economics promoted by George Osborne and Orange Book Liberals. Since 2010, MPs have awarded themselves a 32% increase in pay, so Tory austerity was reserved for the little people, not their

elected representatives. For more than 30 years no Tory politician or think-tanker or columnist has had to bother his or her head with labour market politics. The current crop of ministers

or our morning guides to what is going on, like Nick Robinson, were all active in Conservative student politics in the 1980s. They watched with awe as Margaret Thatcher “defeated” workers

and humiliated the TUC and union general secretaries. They rejoiced as John Major secured an exemption to the very modest, pallid EU social policy directives on maternity leave or working

hours. The trade union and worker problem had been solved, it seemed. Newspapers and the BBC fired all their labour correspondents, leaving just one FT journalist, Sarah O’Connor, to write a

column on labour market issues. But they had not spotted that Mrs Thatcher had left a time bomb silently ticking waiting for the right moment to explode three decades after her mission to

tame workers and unions had been accomplished. This was her 1984 Trade Union Act, mandating secret ballots of workers before any strike could take place. The unions protested that she was

crushing their animal spirits. In fact, she was importing the rules that were the norm in social democratic trade unionism in Northern Europe – Germany, the Nordic nations or Switzerland. It

is the Thatcher secret ballot that has produced the current strike wave. Ministers and the pro-Tory press have tried to demonise some of the strike leaders. Mick Lynch of the RMT certainly

has the gift of the gob. He is also pro-Brexit. But the RMT has disaffiliated from Labour. It has no links with democratic trade unions internationally and instead sits in the same union

international as communist unions in China or Vietnam. The _Daily Mail_ found a British Medical Association leader who went to a friend’s wedding during the doctors’ strike and who comes (as

do many doctors) from a well-off middle class family. The efforts to depict Lynch or the doctors’ leader as comparable to 1980s militant union bosses have not moved the dial one iota.

Ministers kept telling unions to consult their members. They did. Secret ballots were held and members of the once utterly peaceful, unmilitant Royal College of Nursing have just voted to

continue their strikes, as did RMT members. Union bosses were helpless as middle class university graduates, once the backbone of the Tory vote, made clear they wanted some respect from

ministers. It is astonishing that the Cabinet in the last 12 months seems to have no minister with any grasp of the modern labour market. Rishi Sunak, who spent much of his adult life in

southern California and whose immense wealth cannot give him any personal sense of what life for middle- and low-paid workers is like, has a tin ear for the impact of inflation on purchasing

power. Stephanie Flanders, Bloomberg’s Chief Economist, tells Laura Kuenssberg that inflation may fall below 10 per cent, so the problem of rising prices is over. That kind of elite

complacency seems unaware that food inflation has risen by nearly 20 per cent, as rank profiteering by supermarkets continues unchecked. And inflation at high single figures will only fuel

demands for fair compensation in our ever more unequal society. The Prime Minister is taking a big risk by allowing the strikes to continue to the end of the year, as the RCN’s leader, Pat

McCullen, has said is likely if ministers refuse to negotiate. A further drop in the polls for the Tories is likely and a Labour government next year will be ever more certain if the strikes

continue. Labour has to do nothing and can even criticise the strikes, as Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary, does regularly. But if Labour does form the next  government, does it

have a labour market policy  and ideas about pay that will make a difference? The benign years of the Blair Government, when workers in both public and private sectors had pay rises above

inflation, have gone. They won’t be back for another generation. Does anyone in the Shadow Cabinet remember the inflationary 1970s? Strikes over pay after 1974 culminated in the 1978-79

“winter of discontent”. As president of the National Union of Journalists at the time, I led every regional journalist out on strike: not because of my militant rhetoric, but simply because

the journalists wanted to see their incomes protected. That and many other strikes helped to destroy a Labour government. Sir Keir Starmer should worry that the same could happen to Labour

if it enters power. The workers of Britain have a new weapon, far more powerful than a speech by Arthur Scargill or Tony Benn. It is called the secret strike ballot. And it was bequeathed to

them by Margaret Thatcher. _Denis MacShane was NUJ President, 1979-79. He led the first all-out strike by BBC journalists in 1976 which took BBC News off-air in the UK and worldwide._ _ _ A

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