If in one of the famous revels in Downing Street during the pandemic, perhaps searching the basements and attics for a bottle of anything so that the party did not die down (it is an exaggeration), Boris Johnson had found the magic lamp of Aladdin, and after rubbing it, the genie would have told him that he could make three wishes, the first of which would have been a strike like the one that paralyzed Great Britain yesterday. Not because he wants to complicate the lives of his fellow citizens more than it already is, but because it allows him (or so he hopes) to return to the old ideological battles between right and left, and deepen the divisions within Labour.
Fifty thousand railway and London Underground workers put up a stop sign across the country yesterday, in the biggest union action in thirty years. From Aberdeen to Plymouth and from Dover to Cornwall, only one in five trains operated, leaving students unable to go to entrance exams and patients to hospitals for operations that in some cases had been waiting for years. The break has meant a loss of about a billion euros for the hospitality sector, already heavily punished by the inactivity of the pandemic.
With the workers of the London Underground also joining the strike, many streets in the center of the capital were empty compared to what is usually a day with sunshine and a delicious temperature, almost entering summer, to walk and go Shopping. At Glasgow Central Station there were more seagulls than people at rush hour, with all services cancelled.
Railway employees (machinists, mechanics, supervisors, engineers…) have an average salary of almost 40,000 euros per year, and require a 7% increase to compensate at least in part for the increase in the cost of living (the Bank of England estimates that inflation will reach 11% in October. Their employers, with the backing of the government, offer them only 3%, and so far neither of the two parties has shown flexibility. With more strikes scheduled for tomorrow and Saturday, negotiations will resume today without much hope of a compromise.
For Johnson it is manna from heaven, a true gift from Aladdin, from the strikers and the unions who have approved the action. “I ask the citizens to hold on because the country cannot afford to accede to the demands,” he said in that Churchillian tone that he likes, in the style of blood, sweat and tears, and resorting to the old Thatcherite rhetoric of class struggle, the workers against the consumers, as if time had not passed and both concepts had not been blurred, just like the ideological division between the right and the left. The former miners are now Uber drivers, packing house employees or answering phone calls in call centers, most are not unionized and many vote for the Conservative Party.
But one of the sectors in which there is still considerable militancy is transport, despite the fact that salaries are higher than in many others, which does not exactly fuel the sympathy of the citizens who yesterday missed their exams and operations or, like a person who by no means had to travel from Glasgow to London, and paid two thousand euros for a taxi.
Inflation is not as exaggerated as it was in 1975, when it reached 25%, and Thatcher took it upon herself to cut off the claws of the unions, so things are not exactly the same as they were half a century ago. But it is an approximation, with energy prices soaring like then, loss of purchasing power and strikes. That of the railway is only the beginning, because doctors and nurses, teachers, postmen, caregivers of the elderly and even lawyers are also threatened.
Yesterday’s action was not just about money, but to try to preserve jobs. The employers and the Johnson Government want to eliminate a considerable number by appealing to “efficiency”, because the pandemic has changed the lifestyle of the British, teleworking is a reality, many officials do everything from home, subway trips and by train have decreased by 20%, and the income of companies the same.
The Labor leader Keir Starmer has tried to swim between two waters (as he does in everything, including Brexit), without condemning the strikes but saying that they are not a good idea. However, several party deputies joined the picket lines, just what Johnson dreamed of. The prime minister still has two wishes to ask of the genie: one could be that the relationship with the EU becomes even more entrenched, and the other that voters think about immigration again. Divide and conquer.
