Strike now at heart of Tories in disarray

WHO do you side with: nurses, posties, firefighters, ambulance crews, rail workers, dockers, teachers, immigration staff and lecturers?

Or a Conservative Government that crashes the economy, putting up taxes and interest rates as inflation soars and living standards plummet at record rates.

Trade union leaders aren’t bogeymen the Tories can use to bash Labour when everybody is suffering.

Strikes may not be hugely popular, yet nor are they scapegoats for national decline as they were in 1979.

In the 2022 Winter of Discontent the unburied dead are Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Suella Braverman and a Conservative Zombie Government blamed by voters for the mess we’re in. Tory tycoon Michael Ashcroft’s poll finding people rate Keir Starmer’s Labour ahead of Sunak’s Cons on 11 of 12 key issues, including the economy and jobs, captures a mood for change.

Four election victories, five Prime Ministers and a dozen years in power resulting in battered workers and squeezed households becoming poorer, is the Tories running out of excuses.

Frustration at the inconvenience of cancelled trains and undelivered mail is balanced by admiration that plucky trampled workers will have a go.

Labour nervousness over NHS walkouts in particular is reflected in Leftie Wigan warrior Lisa Nandy saying she won’t join a nurses’ picket line after she was photographed earlier this year with striking communications workers despite a clumsy ban by Starmer.

But patients are aware the longest waiting lists in history aren’t the fault of stressed nurses who’ve suffered a 20% cut in the value of their wages over the past decade.

This wave of strikes aren’t a danger to Labour. They’re a death knell for the Conservatives.

Most of us know whose side we’re on and it isn’t a disintegrating Tory Government haemorrhaging authority and respect.