Mass strikes are a disaster for Sunak. But they present challenges for Labour too

As many as half a million people have woken up today and gone on strike. This includes border force workers, train drivers and university lecturers (represented by PCS, ASLEF and the UCU, respectively), but the big one going out today is the NEU, which will see teachers walking out as part of a national strike estimated to impact 85% of schools. Polling from YouGov suggests that the teaching union has public support (with 50% in favour of strikes and 41% against), and the union has been keen to impress that it has the backing of parents’ groups.

The question of how much public support an action has is somewhat fraught. On one hand, strikes are interventions in the real economy, mechanisms to solve disputes over pay and conditions between workers and bosses. Public support is not in the most literal sense relevant to this exchange. On the other hand, strikes do not happen in a vacuum: the song doesn’t go, “it doesn’t matter what side you’re on”, and public pressure is a valuable tool for trade unions or employers.

In some ways, the government’s minimum service levels bill has been a political gift to the Labour Party, something that they can wholeheartedly – and correctly (see our TUC banner advert for more details) – commit themselves to opposing, rather than playing the difficult game of engaging with a wide-ranging set of disputes while keeping within fiscal rules and on the right side of public opinion. This, as Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s recent comments on the viability of a pay rise for nurses shows, can be difficult. Certainly, you are unlikely to find many members of the shadow cabinet on UCU (38% of the public support, 48% oppose) picket lines.

At the grassroots level, an interesting example of this tension came at London Labour’s conference this weekend, where a motion on strikes was hotly debated. The motion concluded by calling on “all wings of the London Labour Party including representatives in London – councillors, members of the Greater London Assembly and MPs – to openly support the industrial action taken by trade unionists, to join picket lines of striking workers”, but many attendees said they felt that the broader wording mandated support for solidarity strikes, which are illegal in the UK. It ultimately went to a card vote, and in a breakdown of the results seen by LabourList, 43% of Constituency Labour Party (CLP) delegates voted for it versus 56% of affiliate delegates (many of whom represented trade unions). The motion fell, on a weighted result of 50.6%.

This day of coordinated strikes is a nightmare for Rishi Sunak’s government, crowning off a winter of discontent worthy of the name. Labour is eyeing the polling and readying itself for government. Should it get there, the consequences of 13 years of Tory rule – which Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves yesterday described as having been an “anchor drag” on the UK economy – will not have gone away. We cannot assume that these tensions will simply resolve themselves: the last winter of discontent, after all, happened under a Labour government.