Strike!

The Labour Party should be sitting pretty on what would appear to be a near unassailable chance of winning the next general election. But never underestimate any political party’s ability to sabotage its own chances, principally by not understanding what the country actually needs; ideology only gets you so far, but ultimately you need to have actual policies which can really work, which can’t immediately be hijacked and subverted.

So, what is Labour doing amid the multiple crises which assail us? It appears to be morphing into Margaret Thatcher’s Tories. Wes Streeting has been on the stump saying that Labour is going to get tough with the health unions and that reform of the NHS is needed, not continued acquiescence to its demands. Now embarked on this trajectory, will it also have to come down hard on the very people who have long funded the party?

Postal workers, nurses, rail transport, bus drivers, Border Farce, university lecturers, barristers, school staff, baggage handlers, firefighters… all have had or will be having a go at attacking the government through the medium of creating chaos and bringing about the prospect of real harm to innocent old you and me. The problem is, of course, that the piggy bank has been smashed open and raided too many times. It doesn’t matter who did it – it’s a bit late for that – we are flat broke.

Does anybody think that any rational employer would squeeze and squeeze every last bit of loyalty from their workforce if there was an easy way to simply pay them more? Oh, seriously? Come on, the robber barons are long gone, replaced by administrations so sensitive to the soft needs of their delicate charges that they employ diversity coordinators and equality managers and decolonialisation evangelists and pay them handsomely for their odious grift.

But surely it is globalism and its impersonal exploitation of needs that is at the centre of all this. Inequality is not just a structural feature of corporate Britain, it is an inevitable outcome of supranational greed and the unchecked power of giant world-connected behemoths, who dictate to governments and effectively stifle local attempts to become independent of their reach.

The internet is – or can be - a force for good, but is just as effective a force for propaganda. The type of propaganda which tells you that you can’t walk alone, you can’t buck the zeitgeist, you can’t survive without Google, or Facebook, or TikTok, or whatever social media is harvesting your every thought. This is where a political movement founded on the individual could really be a game-changer. A party going into battle for the common man. Whoever heard of such a thing?

Coming out with tough talk against the health unions could be a master stroke for Labour, but it could also be a death knell to its campaign if it turns its back on its own red wall. Something has to change, for sure, but as ever it is unlikely to change for the poorly educated, low aspiration masses. For them, the majority of the population, the options to go it alone, to reduce their costs, defend their wages and manage their lives, remains stubbornly out of reach. This winter is set to be one of discontent indeed.