Sunak has a chance to break the unions

We are now a week into the new year and millions of people either still haven’t been able to go into work or have been forced to endure an even more arduous or costly journey than normal.

And it’s not just commuters who have been badly affected. Patients, school children, holidaymakers and businesses are all collateral damage in the trade unions’ fight against a Government to which they are ideologically opposed.

Still, who cares if swathes of the country have had their lives turned upside down, or if the economy is left in ruins – as long as the RMT and its hard-left union counterparts can continue to wage political war, right?

Wrong. So it’s a bit rich of Mick Lynch and other union bosses, having started this battle and escalated the situation on countless occasions instead of backing down in the face of some reasonable pay offers, to suddenly cry foul now that it has turned ugly.

Rishi Sunak’s anti-strike legislation to enforce “minimum service levels” in key public sectors, including the NHS and schools, has prompted a predictably furious though no less hypocritical reaction from the unions. If you pick a scrap with someone, you don’t get to decide how the other side fights back. This is particularly the case given the ruthless, and at times underhand way that the trade union movement has behaved.

In recent weeks, with support among members waning, hard-left activists were being offered prizes to attend multiple pickets, in a desperate attempt to artificially boost attendance on the picket lines. So by deploying 1980s-style tactics the unions have given the Government every excuse necessary to harden its stance in response.

Lynch has likened the proposed new laws to conscription, which is laughable, but also insulting to those who do risk their lives fighting for this country. He has also suggested that the move would be anti-democratic, which is even more risible. The ability to strike won’t be taken away from people. Yet as the Government rightly argues, the right to withdraw one’s labour “must be balanced with the public’s right to life and livelihoods”.

Those who have had their own livelihoods jeopardised by the entirely unreasonable, unaffordable, inflationbusting salary demands of the unions – often from professions that are already well paid – will surely agree.

It is the unions that have made the strikes overtly political both in the way they’ve behaved and the antigovernment rhetoric that is so often used. In playing a political game, isn’t it fair enough to meet them on their own terms? The only thing that is antidemocratic is their attempts to unseat a democratically elected Tory Government that they have a pathological hatred of.

It’s not just Lynch jamming the airwaves with his faux outrage. TUC general secretary Paul Nowak has branded the proposals “an attack on working people”, which is rich given the months of disruption that millions of hardworking folk have been forced to endure. And you certainly can’t complain about the escalation of tensions in one breath if you then do the same in the next. Lynch was quick to threaten retaliation through work-torule tactics – a form of industrial action in which employees do no more than the minimum duties required by their contract – and long-term overtime bans.

Such words show how spooked the unions are. Lynch in particular seems rattled, perhaps because the RMT is looking more and more isolated. While he would love nothing more than to see a general strike, compromises are breaking out everywhere.

This week, bus giant Stagecoach agreed an 11pc pay deal with the GMB that will see drivers in Sunderland return to work, while the nurses’ union has said it is willing to meet the Government halfway and accept a 10pc increase. Meanwhile, picket line numbers are dwindling as strikers count the costs of repeatedly missing work bills go through the roof. By the end of this week, the RMT will have staged 18 days of walkouts since June.

These are sunk costs and if Lynch and his senior colleagues are unable to secure a generous pay rise for the tens of thousands of members who have forgone nearly three weeks of pay in the last six months then it will be very hard to persuade them to take further action.

The boss of the Aslef union has claimed that any changes to working practices could be “existential” for RMT members but he could just have easily been talking about the future of the union itself if it loses this protracted fight. The time for empty platitudes from the Prime Minister has passed.

So rather than talking about how he “celebrates” and “values” the trade unions, as he did this week, Sunak must seize the opportunity to break the power of the unions forever, and that requires real action rather than words. There can be no turning back now.

‘Lynch is rattled, and the RMT is looking more and more isolated’