Bursting Your Bubble: Sunak’s Britain is allergic to doing the right thing

If I weren’t writing a column on the very subject, I would say I’m at a complete loss for words at the omni-crisis developing in Britain. Nurses, ambulance staff, postal workers and others have been on strike for God knows how long, with the simplest of demands imaginable: higher pay. During a cost-of-living crisis, no less. Dec. 15 in particular saw the largest nursing strike in the history of the National Health Service. Britain is feeling the effects far and wide; with hospitals, especially emergency rooms (A&E, as Brits call it), understaffed, people are finding it increasingly difficult to access basic healthcare services, never mind life-saving treatment. 

Yet still, the man at 10 Downing Street, singularly responsible for addressing the situation, has offered nothing in return. Nay, worse: anti-strike legislation.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s genius law, unveiled Thursday and set to be formally introduced in Parliament in a few weeks, will enforce “minimum service levels” in certain public sectors and allow employers to sack and sue workers who violate said levels. In short, it’s a threat to make fighting for workers’ rights illegal. 

“I fully believe in the unions’ role in our society and the freedom for them to strike,” Sunak told broadcasters on Friday. “I also believe that that should be balanced with the right of ordinary working people to go about their lives free from significant disruption.” 

Faced with enormous backlash, he went on to reassure the nation, quite reassuringly, that the law was “entirely reasonable.” There’s an unspoken principle which states that good people needn’t explicitly announce that they are good; I have a feeling the same applies here.

As we’ve come to expect in government, the only appropriate reaction to this legislation has been coming from one side of the aisle: Keir Starmer, head of the Labour opposition, immediately pledged to repeal the law were Labour to win the next general election — which is expected to be as soon as next year. Labour indeed looks favored to win, which offers only minor relief; the immediate reality is that people will die if workers’ demands continue to be ignored. If and when they do, their blood will be on Sunak’s hands.

Even worse, he does not care. Sunak refuses to say whether he uses private healthcare, staunchly defending it as “not really relevant” and a matter of “personal choice.” Mind-blowingly privileged words coming from a mind-blowingly privileged person, who can simply afford to bring down public healthcare and blame it on anyone except himself.

I’m particularly concerned with what this means for the rest of us. Here in the U.S., we’ve also witnessed strikes in recent months: 48,000 UC student workers went on a five-week strike starting November, culminating in a pay raise which was, as one student later tweeted, “enough to disqualify us for [government] assistance programs and bump us to the next tax bracket, but not enough to cover” the heightened living costs that forced them to strike in the first place. In December, President Joe Biden signed legislation forcing railroad unions to accept a contract deal which failed to guarantee paid sick days, all to avoid an economically devastating rail strike.

With the Sunak catastrophe now added to this growing list of strikes, it’s becoming clear that workers’ rights are at a crossroads. If the Prime Minister’s threat against a strike of such high caliber — with its concentrated media attention, economic impact and disruption of daily life — were to succeed, I worry for smaller unions that could never dream to be as important. 

The pattern is well-established. A business does what it does best: maximizing profit at the workers’ expense and praying the workers won’t have the guts to stand up for themselves. However, they do in fact have the guts and stand up for themselves. The business then either rushes them into deals that hardly satisfy their demands, or wait until they exhaust themselves. We’ve seen it with the UC strikes; we’ve seen it with the U.S. rail strikes (although I must credit Biden for breaking this pattern by rushing the deal before strikes even happened); and God forbid we see it again in the U.K. Given the sheer length and persistence of the strikes, and continued majority support from the public, however, there is yet hope.

For now, Sunak’s threat has proved fruitless. Union leaders briefly obliged to the PM’s calls for negotiations, at which he then suggested that nurses demonstrate productivity — i.e. just work harder — in return for a one-off payment, the Guardian reported. More backlash ensued, and now more strikes.

“Show talks between Ministers and trade union leaders representing striking staff will backfire on an incompetent, provocative Tory Government when they were nothing more than a poor PR stunt,” spat an editorial posted Monday by the Daily Mirror. 

Let us pray it backfires, and soon.

Jonathan Park is a sophomore writing about current events beyond the American sphere. His column, “Bursting Your Bubble,” typically runs biweekly on Tuesdays. He is also the news assignments editor for the Daily Trojan.