The Telegraph - Saturday 2nd August 2025
Strike Day was once consigned to history. Now, the unions are running Britain by proxy. What happened?
I have one abiding memory from my early school days in the mid-1980s. It isn’t of a favourite teacher, playground companion, or a treasured lesson. No, what stands out most vividly in my mind is Strike Day. It might not have been every week, but it was regular enough to take on the rhythm of a national ritual.
As a five-year-old, I adored it. The anticipation was electric. Strike Day meant I had a whole, uninterrupted day with my mother. Just the two of us. It was bliss: no school! But of course, for my parents, it was a different story. It was a burden. My mother would have to call in absent from work, adjust her commitments, rearrange the day.
Eventually, my parents, like many working-class families trying to climb, had enough. They opted to send me to an independent school. At least there, the calendar didn’t tremble with every union whim. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, these disturbances came to an end. The grip of the unions was broken. Britain felt governable again.
We thought the era of union rule had passed into history. But Strike Day has returned. Since July 2024, several hundred thousand working days have been lost to strike action. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, 160,000 working days disappeared into the black hole of industrial action. Since the peak in late 2022, over 1.6 million working days have been lost. Unsurprisingly, public sector productivity has plunged – now 4.2 per cent below pre-Covid levels.
The BMA – a union which now more closely resembles a political party than a medical association – recently called a five-day strike because its demand for a pay rise of over 20 per cent wasn’t met. That strike saw around 50,000 resident doctors walk out, resulting in thousands of cancelled procedures. These are not Dickensian workers demanding hot meals and clean conditions. These are qualified professionals, whose average salary is between £47-55,000 per year. But the point isn’t just about pay. It’s about power. And they know they have it.
And it’s not just the doctors. Nurses are threatening a winter strike. Civil servants have walked out in the last year. Train drivers, sixth-form teachers, university staff – all have joined the chorus of disruption. Britain is being quietly but systematically brought to its knees by the same forces we thought had been vanquished a generation ago.
And what has the Government done? Capitulated. Time and again. Ministers shuffle to the negotiating table like supplicants, pen in hand, ready to sign the next cheque. Each time, they hope the gesture will end the militancy. It never does. Appeasement, as history teaches us, only whets the appetite.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has learnt the hard way: this isn’t a rational negotiation – it’s a hostage situation. And the Government is tied to the chair.
The truth is that Labour is not merely negotiating with the unions – they are the unions. Or rather, the unions are them. Almost every Cabinet Minister owes their ascent to union patronage. The party machine is powered by union money, union operatives, union ideology. The very people meant to hold the line against disruptive action are, in fact, the authors of it. And the consequences are now being laid bare.
Consider the Employment Rights Bill – Labour’s legislative love letter to the unions. It promises to repeal the Tory anti-strike laws of 2016 and 2023, lower the thresholds for industrial action, and tilt the field further toward collective bargaining. This is an open invitation for more disruption.
Once again, we find ourselves ruled not by Parliament, but by the backroom deal. Beer and sandwiches are back. But this time, they’re accompanied by collapsing productivity, eroded business confidence, and the creeping sclerosis of the state.
Strike Day has become a national curse. And unless we find the courage once more to challenge the vested interests that now run Britain by proxy, it will become a permanent fixture of our national life – another symbol of decline in a country too frightened to govern itself.
Suella
