Labour's grand plan to get into power? Do nothing

This strike wave began with the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union’s three days of national rail strikes.

As we know, many other workers and their unions have since joined in the fight against the cost of living crisis. Between June 2022 and April 2023, 3.743 million days were not worked due to strikes.

The strikes continue with disputes on the railways and in universities, schools, the civil service and the NHS still not settled. While initial offers have been increased by employers, this has been way too little and way too late.

By contrast, many disputes and strikes in the private sector have been done and dusted. The Unite union, in particular, has been successful in often gaining double-digit pay rises in the transport sector.

This gives an inkling of the central and critical difference between strikes in the public and private sectors.

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Strikes in the public sector – and where the government is also the ultimate employer or paymaster like with the railways – are essentially political strikes and not economic strikes.

Strikes here do not try to hurt the employer in the pocket. Instead, they try to put political pressure on the government of the day by making it look weak, incompetent, uncaring or self-interested.

In order to realise that ambition, the strikes – and the issues giving rise to them – need to generate political heat by becoming political “hot potatoes”. In other words, they have to become just too hot to handle, requiring a government climbdown which amounts to settling the industrial dispute on terms favourable to the strikers and their unions.

In Scotland, the strikes by refuse workers last summer and the teachers’ strikes earlier this year were classic examples of this. The Scottish Government caved in, providing more money to settle the disputes, even though the employers were the local authorities.

Translating this to the Westminster situation means that the role of the official opposition in Parliament is essential in terms of what it does and does not do.

Put simply, the reason why the public sector and rail strikes have not made a bigger political impact and put more pressure upon the Westminster government is down to Keir Starmer and Labour.

Starmer has taken the position of agreeing with the case for higher pay rises – albeit within reason – but not supporting the strikes themselves. He has constantly called for further negotiations to settle the disputes when it is patently obvious that the Tories won’t listen to the force of argument and will only be moved by the argument of force.

So, this is tantamount to not giving any support and undermining any potential for generating political heat. It is this inaction on the part of Starmer and Labour that crucially explains why these public sector strikes and those on the railways have dragged on for so long without a satisfactory settlement for the workers involved.

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But there’s more to this story than just this. A Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn would have acted very differently in these circumstances. It would have made hay while the sun shone so to speak.

Motivated by this kind of thinking, the left makes the argument that if Starmer and Labour actually supported the strikes then they would be much more electorally popular than they currently are. But the problem in politics presently is that the old adage that incumbent parties in government lose elections rather more than opposition parties win them is surprisingly salient.

Starmer’s strategy is essentially to bask in the unpopularity of the Tories and to use this as a cover for his reheated Blairist, “new” Labour politics. Any criticism of the Tories tends to make the alternatives proffered much better than they actually are. And, unfortunately, this grand political strategy is working.

Thus, for the vast majority of 2020, the Tories were well ahead of Labour in the polls following their 2019 General Election victory. This began to change towards the end of the 2020 and into 2021.

However, though the Tory lead shrank, it was still notable. But from the end of 2021, Labour overtook the Tories in the polls, with the lead increasing into double digits from the late summer of 2022.

Labour have continued to stay at those levels well into 2023 (even if this showed a decline from 20%+ to 10%+ from late 2022) no matter Starmer’s personal poll ratings.

In amongst all this, Starmer and Labour are clearly benefitting from the popularity of strikes against the cost of living crisis and the blame being put for them at the door of the Tories. Starmer and Labour are not so much a case of “missing in action” but offering a palpable political presence of inaction.

Professor Gregor Gall is visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds