Rishi Sunak needs to get tough on strikers

We are still a long way from the Winter of Discontent, when 29.5 million worker-days were lost to strikes. Nevertheless, with today’s strike of 115,000 postal workers the number is creeping inexorably upwards. This one-day strike alone will cost 40 per cent of the 273,000 lost working days recorded across all industries over the whole of 2018.

To describe Britain as being in the grip of a wave of public sector strikes isn’t quite accurate. The 115,000 Royal Mail workers who have walked out today are not public sector workers. Nor are the train drivers, guards and other train staff who have been striking, on and off, for much of the past decade. All are employees of private companies, yet their unions have still managed to engineer national strikes.

It is pretty clear that the privatisation of public services has done nothing to quell trade union militancy. The whole business was transferred, like the post boxes and trains, into the private sector.