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.
Bu hikaye The Guardian Weekly dergisinin January 20, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The Guardian Weekly dergisinin January 20, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Putin's Call To De-Dollarise Alarms Some At BRICS Talks
Vladimir Putin opened the expanded Brics summit last month by issuing a call for an alternative international payments system that could prevent the US using the dollar as a political weapon.
Power in the darkness
Wolf Hall is back. As the extraordinary epic about King Henry VIII and his vengeful entourage edges to a climax, Timothy Spall reveals what it was like to play Cromwell's nemesis
It's time for Trump's instincts to be called what they are: fascist
There is a good chance that on 5 November, Americans will elect the first fascist president of the United States.
CASTLES IN THE AIR
It was meant to be a dream development of mansions in the Turkish hills. But 13 years on, Burj AI Babas is a half-built ghost town, and a microcosm of the scandal-hit construction sector under Erdoğan. Will the buyers ever get to move in?
Using cutting-edge methods, Alexandra Morton-Hayward is unravelling the mysteries of grey matter – even as hers betrays her The brain collector
ALEXANDRA MORTON-HAYWARD, a 35-year-old mortician turned molecular palaeontologist, had been behind the wheel of her rented Vauxhall for five hours, motoring across three countries, when a torrential storm broke loose on the plains of Belgium.
Dark times Blackouts spark fears of wider collapse
Maria Elena Cárdenas is 76 and lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana's colonial old town.
Washington Post sparks fury over decision not to endorse
Fury and shock ripped through liberal America last weekend after news that the Washington Post, home of the Watergate scandal exposé, will not endorse Kamala Harris for president.
The great space waste
From chaotic collisions to depletion of the ozone layer, the thousands of satellites in orbit around Earth have the potential to wreak havoc
New heights Teen Sherpa's fight for climbing equality
Growing up as a sherpa in Nepal, Nima Rinji Sherpa was used to his relatives performing superhuman feats on the mountains.
Plastic cave made in Spain keeps Amazonian culture alive
It is not yet dawn in Ulupuwene, an Indigenous village in the Brazilian Amazon, but the Wauja people have already risen to prepare for the festive day ahead.
