The Tories are too weak towards union militants

Britain is flailing. It’s not all our fault; global shocks caused by the Ukraine war and European intransigence over Brexit have soured the economy, while the cultural madness sweeping the West continues to knock us off course. But when it comes to certain basics, we have no excuse. We face a winter of horrendous, mickey-taking strikes in which the ringleaders are holding the country hostage while demanding massive pay increases that will fuel already spiralling inflation.

Despite having had a Tory government for the last 12 years, there’s apparently nothing we can do about it. The Government response seems to be head-shaking and tut-tutting. Perhaps too many in the Cabinet don’t rely on rail, the Tube, Royal Mail, or NHS nurses and therefore feel at a remove from the fact that we are in dire straits both materially and ideologically. Union strangleholds should be a thing of the ultra-socialist past.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. There is one thing that the Government has thought of by way of response: tugs on the heartstrings of people who clearly have none. Ministers have asked the RMT, the rail union, to be “altruistic” and rethink its wave of pre-Christmas strikes.

But it’s hard to see how a plea for altruism will help much. Aside from the fact that they’re unlikely to say “oh yes, we hadn’t thought of that in timing our crippling strikes in the run-up to Christmas”, it is desperately lazy. We live in times so sozzled on emotional hyperbole – as a substitute for reality and moral clarity – that perhaps ministers really think that pleading love not hate would be as effective as doing their jobs.

One cannot help, rather miserably, but to think back to Margaret Thatcher’s response to the unions in the 1980s. To defeat the miners and allow Britain to unstick itself from the socialist swamp it had got itself into, she planned meticulously, stockpiling coal. She, like the unions, was uncompromising and it wasn’t easy, but in refusing to make a concession to them, she, and Britain, won. I’m sure she’d have preferred to have had the same result by simply making a plea for altruism – so much quicker and easier – but no doubt she knew it wouldn’t work.