As Britains suffers through the great strike, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has vowed that anti-strike laws will be brought to protect lives and livelihoods.
With a triple whammy of frigid weather, an early snowfall and crippling strikes across multiple industries, Britain faces what the London tabloids have labeled another winter of discontent.
Those striking include postal workers and railway employees; as many as 100,000 nurses; driving-test examiners at motor-vehicle departments; baggage handlers; bus drivers; road crews; and energy-company employees. The newspapers have taken to publishing color-coded calendars to help readers keep track of which services will be interrupted on what date.
The proliferating labor unrest has drawn comparisons to the original winter of discontent, in 1978 and ’79, when public- and private-sector strikes paralyzed the country — ultimately toppling the Labour government and ushering in a decade of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher. Today, trade unions are not as strong as they once were, but the political danger to the current Conservative government is still acute.
Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, is grappling with a surfeit of other problems: double-digit inflation, rising interest rates and a recession.
Speaking to the British news media, he said that he planned to introduce anti-strike legislation next year and that it was “not right” to cause “such misery and disruption” at Christmas time.
