Summer of discontent as Britain faces debilitating public sector strikes
Thousands of schools will close as teachers stay away from class and travellers face major delays at ports and airports as immigration officials join the protest.
Protests are becoming increasingly common across Europe in what is turning into a summer of strife.
The most vivid images have come from Greece where hooded youths rioted ahead of the parliamentary vote on budget cuts and tax rises to stave off bankruptcy.
In Poland, the Solidarity trade union has organised a day of protests in Warsaw against the centre-right government for today, a day before Poland assumes the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union for the first time.
Solidarity, heir to the organisation that toppled the communist regime in 1989, has invited workers from other European countries including crisis-stricken Greece to join the protests.
Across Europe, households are facing up to lower living standards as governments strive to repair public finances battered by the credit crisis of 2008/2009.
Public sector workers in Britain are already facing a pay freeze and more than 300,000 job cuts as the Conservative-led coalition seeks to virtually wipe out by 2015 a budget deficit that peaked at more than 10% of national output.
Pension reform is the final straw for some unions, angered that their members are being asked to work longer and pay more for their retirement.
The government and the Labour party have both condemned the strikes as premature, given that talks between unions and ministers are still being held.
However, the stoppages today are likely to be just a taste of things to come later this year if those talks fail to close the yawning gap between the two sides.
Sympathy for the strikers appears to be limited.
“I understand why they have called a strike but my attitude is they have to wake up and smell the coffee,” said Phil Stanley, 47, an engineer from Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire.
“I haven’t had a pay rise for three years so they have a slight lack of reality,” he added as he waited for a train at London’s Liverpool Street station.
The strikes are a key test for a coalition that took power in May 2010 with the priority of cleaning up public finances.
The government has announced spending cuts totalling £81 billion by 2015 and any sign of retreat over pensions would unnerve financial markets.
Britain’s first coalition for 65 years has endured a wobbly few weeks, retreating on reforms to overhaul the National Health Service after pressure from the medical lobby and the Liberal Democrat, junior coalition party.
The government also dropped plans to allow criminals to serve shorter sentences after a media outcry.
“This could be the beginning of quite a long series of strikes,” said Alastair Newton, senior political analyst at Nomura.
“I think the government is under pressure to stand firm on this one, frankly. I think you will see that heavily reflected in the press.”
“If union members are determined, this could go on for quite a bit and be very disruptive and the public will get more and more and more hacked off,” he added.
Union power in Britain has waned since Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government took on print and mining unions in the 1980s, changing the face of British industry.
Some on the right of the party are calling for tougher laws to limit strikes — imposing minimum turnout levels for ballots to be valid and minimum service agreements for public sector workers.
However, unions argue that rules meaning ballots have to be conducted by post rather than show of hands are already restrictive.
“There is plenty of legislation to deal with strikes — I hope they don’t get distracted into that as that could cause rifts in the coalition,” said Newton.
Protests have spread across Europe. In Spain, dozens of “los indignados” (the indignant), demonstrating against high unemployment and economic stagnation, camped outside parliament to protest as lawmakers debated amendments to the Socialist government’s wage reform bill, meant to make the economy more competitive. The reforms were decreed into law by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s cabinet on June 10 and have been criticised by both unions and business groups.
On June 15, politicians in the Catalonia region of northeastern Spain were forced to enter parliament by helicopter or under police escort as protests grew against a planned 10% cut in public spending.
Last month, tens of thousands of demonstrators, angry over unemployment and austerity measures, packed Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square before local elections. Demonstrators have filled Spain’s city plazas, after years of patience over a long economic slump.
At night the crowds on the square swelled to up to 30,000 people.
In France, solidarity with “los indignados” in Madrid has already inspired several dozen French youths to spend nights camped out at the Place de la Bastille, the Paris square where a jail was torn down during the 1789 French Revolution.
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