How long can Boris hold the line on railway strikes?

Is the government’s approach to strikes and public sector pay too blunt? Today Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak took the opportunity of the Cabinet meeting to underline ‘the importance of fiscal discipline’. The Chancellor told the meeting that ‘the government had responsibility to not take any action that would feed into inflationary pressures or reduce the Government’s ability to lower taxes in the future’. That’s a roundabout way of saying to ministers (and the public, given this part of the private meeting was briefed out) that he’s not budging on public sector pay increases. It is a far cry from the ‘high wage, high skill economy’ that the Prime Minister was promising just months ago at the Tory party conference.

The meeting also saw Johnson condemning the rail strikes, saying ‘the union barons need to sit down with Network Rail and the train companies, and get on with coming to a sensible compromise for the good of the British people and the rail workforce’.