My least favourite genre in all of art – that is everything from cinema and sculpture to literature and music – is actors playing characters who hate their jobs. My view is that successful actors receive adoration and lucrative Oscars goodie bags while struggling ones presumably enjoy the creative outlet in their work.
Millions of others do it for the money. So when they are offered sub-inflationary pay rises, also known as a real-terms pay cut, there is a fair amount of public sympathy.
At the same time, we’re a fairly fickle bunch, sometimes supporting the right of workers to withdraw their labour until it actually impacts us. Like anyone hoping to catch a train on Christmas Eve.
The RMT union has announced rail strikes over the holiday period, starting at 6pm on 24 December until 6am on 27 December. This is in addition to industrial action earlier in the month and in January. Good luck to anyone trying to get out of London at the last minute, to restaurants braced for a wave of cancellations and retail stores hoping for a big Boxing Day.
Targeting Christmas Day represents a risk for the RMT, which has thus far managed to stay roughly on the right side of public opinion. A rail strike that forces people to work from home for a couple of days (of course, not everyone can) is one thing. Generating stories in the press of key workers being prevented from seeing their families at Christmas is another.
Then again, those key workers themselves may also be on strike. We’ve compiled an exhaustive list of the sectors and services either on or threatening to go on strike in the coming weeks. In addition to rail workers, this includes: ambulance staff, nurses and junior doctors, civil servants (including from the Home Office, Job Centres, passport and DVLA, the Border Force), Royal Mail workers, firefighters, Shelter employees, university lecturers, teachers and London bus drivers.
At the risk of breaking the glass and reaching for the ‘winter of discontent’ cliche, that is rather a lot. While the government doesn’t want to look like it’s lost control, it’s also desperate to hold the line on public sector pay. But this has downsides too. Not only strikes in the short-term, but recruitment struggles in the medium to long-term, particularly following a decade of public sector wage restraint.
I can offer no smart-aleck conclusion. Ultimately, Britain has suffered two economic shocks in the last three years: Covid followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sent energy prices soaring. As a result, we are poorer. (A third shock, our exit from the EU’s single market and customs union, has hardly helped matters.)
The pain of real-terms wage cuts and interest rate rises to slow the economy down and cool inflation is sort of the point. Which is why you don’t hear politicians of either party say such a thing out loud.
Elsewhere in the paper, police are investigating a blaze at an Iranian resistance group’s north London headquarters amid ‘firebombing’ claims. Neighbours reported spotting a man throwing a molotov cocktail which destroyed a bin room before fleeing the scene at 1.50am on Monday on Temple Road, Cricklewood.
In the comment pages, Matthew d’Ancona predicts that if Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, institutional reform will not be the first item in his in-tray. But given the damage done by short-termism and populism, it shouldn’t be absent from his list of priorities either. While Emma Loffhagen has a World Cup confession: she misses the WAG drama.
And finally, remember that fish finger croissant from earlier this week? Londoner’s Diary has spotted a French journalist who is quite upset about the whole thing. Clearly, the mind games ahead of Saturday’s World cup quarter-final have started. To that end, this evening I’ll be starting with escargot in Yorkshire puddings followed by boeuf bourguignon with a baked bean jus.
