The bloated public sector is showing its contempt for taxpayers with plans to strike

Nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are to strike for two days in December – their biggest walkout in NHS history.

After the Government rejected nurses’ demands for a stonking 19pc pay rise, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) says it “has no choice”. While RCN nurses will provide emergency care on December 15 and 20, routine services will be hit.

NHS staff in England and Wales have been awarded a pay rise of at least £1,400 – worth about 4pc on average for nurses – with ministers following the recommendations of the independent NHS Pay Review Body. Nurses also got a 3pc pay rise last year, despite a broader public sector pay freeze.

This will be only the second time the RCN has gone on strike – and a host of other major health unions, including Unison, the Royal College of Midwives and GMB are also balloting members.

With inflation still in double-digits, the “winter of discontent” some of us predicted at the start of the year is now upon us. On Thursday postal workers and university staff across Britain walked out, with warnings of more industrial action to come.

Hundreds of delivery staff serving fast-food chains such as KFC and Burger King just voted to strike. And tens of thousands of rail workers will refuse to work again for four days in both December and January, upending the holiday season travel plans of millions during the first Christmas free of Covid restrictions since 2019.

The UK’s cost of living crisis is now every bit as serious as during the late 1970s. The consumer price index was 11.1pc higher in October than the same month last year – with headline inflation at a 41-year high. This was driven by record price rises for necessities – fuel, utilities, clothes and food – hitting the poor hardest.

The producer price index – capturing the cost of inputs businesses need for the goods and services they sell us – was 19.2pc higher than a year ago, pointing to even larger supply chain price pressures. That suggests the inflation already hard-pressed households face in the shops and online will become worse before it gets better.

Amid the barrage of tax rises announced in the mid-November Autumn Statement, it was easy to overlook perhaps the most important statistic of all. UK households are expected to endure a 7.1pc drop in living standards over the next two years, according to forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Falling real-terms pay, rising prices and climbing mortgage costs are battering household incomes, now on course to fall at their fastest pace in six decades. So that’s a cost of living squeeze even worse than the one which sparked the widespread industrial strife of that long winter of late 1978 and early 1979, the most economically dysfunctional and politically fractious period in Britain’s post-war history.

Back then, over half the workforce was unionised, compared to less than a quarter now. That’s why – despite a similar looming energy crisis and the UK once again threatened by 1970s-style power cuts – some say comparisons with the winter of discontent are overdone.