Who governs Britain? Not Rishi Sunak

Almost half a century ago, on 28 February 1974, Britain went to the polls in a general election called by Tory prime minister Edward Heath. The election was called in the midst of a crisis eerily resembling the situation that confronts Rishi Sunak today.

Britain was ‘working from home’ on a three day working week announced by Heath in a bid to cope with the crisis, which included a full blown strike by the National Union of Mineworkers. Then, as now, the country was also suffering an energy crisis after a foreign war. Oil prices had rocketed following the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

Heath assumed that the country would back his government against trade union militancy, and framed the election with the question ‘Who governs Britain?’ The answer on polling day was ‘not you matey!’

Unexpectedly, the Tories lost 28 seats and their majority. After failing to construct a coalition with the Liberals, Heath resigned and Labour leader Harold Wilson became prime minister of a minority government. The following year Heath was successfully challenged for the Tory leadership by Margaret Thatcher and never held office again.

Though there are important similarities between the 1974 crisis year and the strike wave engulfing Rishi Sunak’s embattled regime today, there are some differences too. In the 1970s, industrial action was led by union barons politically motivated to oppose Tory attempts to solve industrial disputes in the courts. Today’s strikes, however, are fuelled by inflation which has negated recent pay rises.

Today’s pay claims by nursing and teaching unions enjoy a high degree of public support, whereas the demands of the RMT and Aslef unions – who go on strike yet again tomorrow (Friday) – are widely felt to be greedy and inconveniencing  commuters for no good reason. The travelling public’s sympathy for the obviously politically motivated rail union leaders may be in increasingly short supply.

So far, Sunak’s handling of the biggest strike wave in decades has been muted to the point of silence. Beyond feeble ritual expressions of ‘disappointment’, ministers have done little or nothing to defuse the crisis or explain why huge inflation-busting pay increases are unaffordable in the current climate.

If the present prime minister is to avoid Heath’s path into political failure and oblivion when he faces the voters in 2024, he needs to stop being buffeted by events and take the ship of state’s tiller firmly in hand. Only a tough response can convince the public that he is steering a safe course through the storm. At the moment the answer to the question of who governs Britain is: anyone but the government.