Is Labour taking Britain back to the 1970s?

As the Birmingham binmen’s strike, full on since 11 March, grinds well into its second month, there is talk of similar action spreading nationwide. A crop of lurid headlines have been appearing in the press: ‘My Mercedes was destroyed by rats’, exclaims the Daily Telegraph, while the Daily Star announces that ‘Psycho seagulls and super rats team up to spread disease in Birmingham trash mountains.’ Residents, meanwhile, have begun to complain about marauding urban foxes, and of infestations of cockroaches and ‘rats as big as cats.’ With Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner calling in the army to help with the crisis, there is, as so often with Keir Starmer’s government, a sense of déjà vu: such scenes recall the darkest days of the 1970s.

The crisis was not – Rayner and co. may take heart – exclusively a Labour phenomenon. In Autumn 1970, under Edward Heath’s newly elected Conservatives, 60,000 refuse and sewage workers went on a two-month strike, with calamitous results.