Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)In politics it always pays to watch the money. The most telling recent fact in British politics has been the fact that in the three months to September, the Labour party attracted £2.8 million in business donations, which is the first time Labour has raised more than the Tories since Sir Keir Starmer became leader. It is a timely infusion of cash because a saga of industrial battles is about to unfold and they always place the Labour Party in an invidious position.
As the party that announces its allegiance in its name, Labour comes under internal pressure to back industrial action, almost irrespective of its nature. It is, argue those on the Left of the party, a matter of principle. If the workers are in dispute with the bosses, then what is the party of Labour for if it is not to take their side? But in brute point of fact the position is always complicated if the party is also serious about either being in or getting into power, as it is now. With its opinion poll lead oscillating between 11 and 20 points, Labour still has a lot of public persuading to do and its leading figures are wary of uncritical endorsement of strikes, for which public support may be fleeting.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, probably did not intend the Sunday newspaper headline which suggested, in summary of an interview he had given, that he was declaring a war on the public sector trade unions. In fact, Streeting had merely expressed a few well-chosen reservations about the uncompromising stance taken up by the British Medical Association (BMA), with whom the Labour Party has a history of conflict that goes back all the way to the BMA’s opposition to the creation of the National Health Service in 1948.
Striking the right note is made paradoxically more difficult by the fact that the strikers have a good case. The Government has announced that, in England, pay for doctors will rise by 4.5 per cent and pay for other NHS staff —which includes the nurses — by 4.75 per cent. At the lower end of the pay scale, porters and cleaners were awarded a pay rise of up to 9.3 per cent. Yet when inflation is running at 14 per cent, these numbers constitute a significant effective pay cut, as the Royal College of Nurses keeps pointing out.
If industrial action were confined to the nurses, then the political dilemma might be easy enough. There aren’t many groups of workers who can be confident of retaining public confidence like the nurses can. But the same certainty does not extend all the way out into the workforce. Already, the bus drivers, the RMT train drivers and the Scottish teachers have been on strike. This week, unless there are last-minute interventions, the Royal Mail postal workers, the train drivers once more and then Royal College of Nurses staff will not be going into work. Before long they may well be joined in dispute by the rail engineers, Border Force staff, airport baggage handlers, ambulance staff and workers on the national highways.
There is a real danger, in other words, that the country will soon feel ungovernable. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, seems to be stretching out his tactic of being absent to breaking point. It made sense, after the brief fiasco of Liz Truss, to calm things down but Mr Sunak is already looking supine in the wake of a serious threat to the functioning of public services. The Government’s refusal to negotiate simply cannot last. There will have to be a settlement. Instead, the Prime Minister is threatening to toughen up the law to make strikes more difficult in general but in particular to prohibit industrial action by ambulance workers and firefighters. In a battle between an unpopular Prime Minister at the end of a long period of Tory government and the workers in the emergency services, I would not be confident on Mr Sunak’s behalf.
Yet the troubles of Mr Sunak do not necessarily pave the way for a clear Labour stance. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has consistently said that not every demand can be met. When the Labour Party hosted a gathering of British businesses in Canary Wharf last week, a large part of the purpose was to persuade them that Labour was now a reliable custodian of the public finances. The desperate desire to win power — which is, after all, the Labour Party’s first objective — means supporting every strike is impossible. If those speaking on behalf of the Labour Party sound a little mealy-mouthed, don’t expect that to change any time soon.
