The British social summer has been hot, the autumn is likely to be just as hot. After years of apathy, tens of thousands of workers went on strike in July and August: railway workers, postal workers, lawyers, bus drivers, dockers, Amazon employees, garbage collectors and even journalists… Nurses, teachers or firefighters could follow in September: they are currently being consulted by their unions.
Main reason for their anger: their purchasing power, eroded by the explosion of energy bills (they will increase by 80% in October) and double-digit inflation (it was 10.1% over one year in July and could reach 13% by the end of the year, according to the Bank of England). At the end of July, 2.5 million civil servants (teachers, nurses, police officers) were offered salary increases ranging from 3.5% to 9% by the Johnson government, deemed too low to compensate for the rise in the cost of living.
Repeated calls for wage moderation from Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, have done nothing to calm people’s minds. “If everyone tries to beat inflation [en augmentant les salaires ou les prix de vente], the situation will not calm down, it will get worse”, he said again on BBC Radio 4 in early August. The mega-profits of oil companies or energy distributors, who profit from soaring gas prices, also sharpen anger.
Ultraliberal vision
The arrival of Liz Truss in Downing Street, a follower of “less state” and deregulation, could mobilize even more. During the internal Conservative Party primary organized this summer to replace Boris Johnson, she multiplied the pikes against the strikers. “I will not let the country be held hostage by militant trade unionists”proclaimed this leader, who extolled ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, known for having confronted and broken, in the early 1980s, a trade union movement at the time still very powerful.
In recent days, M.me Truss had the opportunity to further develop his ultraliberal vision, indicating that it was necessary to stop focusing public policies on the “redistribution” and that he was ” just ” to return money to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts. She also announced her intention to further deregulate the British labor market at the expense of workers’ rights, for example by revising the law on working time (inherited from European law, limiting it to forty-eight hours a week) or by establishing a minimum service obligation in transport.
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