The unions are cracking under the cost-of-living crisis

From a standing start roughly three years ago, Openreach’s full fibre network now reaches 9m homes and businesses across the UK, while the pace of engineering is expected to ramp up from 2.6m premises last year to more than 3m this year, and again in 2023.

But here’s the bit that the CWU won’t want its members to hear – support for its strike campaign has been nothing like as widespread as it might have hoped. Of the 40,000 BT workers that the CWU claims to “proudly represent”, it is estimated that the highest turnout was less than 24,000, equivalent to just two thirds of the membership base.

What’s more, the numbers have been tailing off, falling by an estimated 20pc between the first day of action in July and the eighth and final day at the end of October to just 19,000 – less than half the BT membership.

The reason for this is blisteringly obvious: as soaring energy bills and spikes in mortgage costs exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis for millions, frontline workers cannot afford to keep voluntarily forgoing pay.

The CWU has emphatically rejected the suggestion that some members have lost the stomach for a fight, lambasting “the folly of senior management” for presuming “that battle fatigue and financial pressures would sap the will of employees to continue fighting for a fair pay rise,” as industrial action came to an end.

It has urged employees to “remain resolved to win and stick with your colleagues” and insisted that “there can be no wavering in the determination to secure a fair pay deal for all”.

Yet it is inevitable that for some, the financial realities of repeatedly taking home lower pay packets will inevitably begin to weigh, if not triumph over ideology altogether. Some will have also begun to grasp that their actions amount to a form of self-harm in that it risks undermining the very cause that they are fighting for.

This is in full view at Royal Mail, where hundreds of millions of pounds of losses resulting partly from repeated strikes have prompted chairman Keith Williams to lose patience and draw up plans for 10,000 job losses.

The effectiveness of postal strikes has been further weakened by the fact that few people seem to really care if their post is a day or two late any more, while train strikes look increasingly self-defeating as the railways slide further into crisis.

Even the co-ordinated nature of this summer’s strikes may have backfired – company bosses say it has provided a form of air cover for them to adopt a more uncompromising stance during negotiations.

Like Williams, Philip Jansen too is refusing to budge. Talks with the unions about this year’s pay deal would not be reopened, he told The Telegraph. Jansen said “the matter is closed” and insisted BT’s 5pc average pay offer was “market leading” when it was made in April.

The message may finally be getting through to the CWU, which responded by saying that it was “seeking a resolution to the dispute” and is hopeful of further meetings next week.

Not for the first time, the unions look to have overplayed their hand in their attempts to hold the country to ransom.