Striking workers are telling the truth about British politics

More strikes are coming to Britain, with 100,000 civil servants due to strike on 1 February. For 18 days across February and March, 150 universities will be shut down by University and College Union action.

- Nesrine Malik

Last week, M 45,000 junior doctors began voting on strike action. They will join transport workers, nurses, ambulance workers and a number of other public and private professionals an objection of strikers, to suggest a collective noun.

Their caricatures have been vividly painted - "fat cat" trade union leaders, entitled workers, uncaring healthcare professionals who are taking advantage of bad times to snatch a higher paycheck; all at the expense of small businesses and poorly patients. These are compelling portrayals. Life is already hard, and those making it immediately and practically harder are easier to blame than those making it abstractly so. A paramedic who refuses to get in their ambulance is a more visible villain than a blur of ministers who have passed policies over the years that have compelled that worker to strike.

But something is emerging that is posing a potent counterargument to anti-strike sentiment. The government is a mess, veering between long periods of absence and sudden bursts of pugnaciousness. Labour, on the other hand, takes the moral high ground, but is absent on the actual ground. Keir Starmer rightly points out that the nurses' strike is a "badge of shame" for the government, but then bans frontbench Labour MPs from showing active support for the strikes.