Strikes ahead show now is the UK's summer of our discontent, thankfully!

The post-Thatcher “death of the trade ­unions” was, it seems, greatly exaggerated.

Network Rail (where RMT union ­members are in dispute) has offered its workforce a pay increase of 4%, which is well below inflation (which, by the most conservative estimate, currently sits at 9.4%). The pay increases offered by BT and Openreach range between 3% and 8%.

These disputes are replicated in a ­torrent of national and local actions being ­taken throughout the UK, from Arriva bus ­workers in the north west of England, to council workers in Hackney, east London and the on-going strike by criminal barristers. Add to that a flood of strike ballots and votes on pay – from the overwhelming rejection of Jaguar Land Rover’s pay offer by Unite union members to the strike ballot of 25,000 Unison members in Scottish local government.

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A Not all of the disputes in which trade ­unionists are currently involved are over pay. The wave of industrial action included yesterday’s scheduled strike by members of the Unite union on the Glasgow Subway.

Workers there are furious at attempts by the management of Strathclyde ­Partnership for Transport (SPT) to force through ­significant changes to their rotas. The level of outrage within the workforce was ­reflected in an astonishing 99% vote to strike on an 83% turnout.

The new duty rosters have led to Subway workers finding themselves compelled to do additional shifts at short notice. Unite insists that “discussions with SPT have failed to give members assurances over family responsibilities, and that personal time away from work will be respected.”

The Tories’ response to the strike wave has been – as it always is – to pose as the friend of whichever section of “the public” they can claim is being “inconvenienced” by the industrial action. This rhetoric is then backed up by the right-wing media and, shamefully, the supposedly impartial BBC.

Take the RMT strikes across the UK for example. On June 23, the Financial Times reported that the strikes had the support of 58% of the public.

In that case, why did BBC journalists conducting vox pops seem to only be able to find people who wanted to condemn the strikers for causing disruption?

This kind of negative media ­coverage has served to embolden the Tories. ­Divided and rudderless though they are, they are still threatening to legislate to further restrict trade union rights and to give employers more powers to bring in strike-breaking agency workers.

Such threats would be unthinkable if the Labour Party was doing what it was created to do and defended the interests of working people. However, the party’s leader Sir Keir Starmer – who shares the awful, New Labour politics of Tony Blair and is about as charismatic as a table leg – has, shamefully, set his face against ­workers’ efforts to fight back against b­elow inflation pay offers and attacks on their conditions of work.

Starmer even went so far, in his ­attempts to establish his anti-strike ­credentials, as to sack Sam Tarry as shadow ­transport minister for having the temerity to join rail workers’ picket lines. Soon after that, the Labour leader was tweeting his ­support for the English women’s ­football team. One wit commented that the ­England team’s forwards were the only strikers that Starmer was willing to ­support.

If the Labour leadership has betrayed the very trade unions that created the ­party in the first place, the SNP leadership’s position has been tame, at best. Deputy First Minister John Swinney wrote a letter to Chancellor of the ­Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi requesting an increase in the Westminster grant to Holyrood, in order to fund improved pay offers to public servants in Scotland.

There has been no unambiguous statement of support from the SNP leadership for workers’ efforts to prevent their ­wages falling ever further behind ­burgeoning ­inflation. In fact, when workers at ­recently nationalised ScotRail asked for a reasonable pay increase, the Scottish Government responded with a derisory 2.2% offer (at a time when inflation was sitting at around 8%).

The current increase in industrial ­action by trade unionists poses a serious question for the Scottish independence movement. That question is, quite simply: “Whose side are you on?”

The independence movement is a broad and ­diverse one, from radical socialist republicans on its left wing, to free-marketeer monarchists on its right, and all manner of social democratic, green and liberal shades of opinion in-between. However it should never be forgotten that the surge in support, both for the SNP and for ­independence, over the last 15 years and more is rooted in the disaffection of ­working class people.

That disaffection has two key elements. Firstly, a longstanding frustration that Scotland – which hasn’t had a majority Tory vote since the 1950s – has, nevertheless, been governed by Tories at Westminster for most of the last 60 years.

Secondly – and crucially for the ­fortunes of both the SNP and the ­independence movement – working class people in ­Scotland turned en masse against a ­moribund and complacent ­Labour Party that seemed to take their votes for granted while doing precious little to protect or advance their interests.

Now – when the capitalist system is in an economic turmoil that predates, but is exacerbated by, the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine – it is incumbent upon us all to decide who should pay for the cost of living crisis.

To argue that workers should accept ­below inflation “pay rises” (i.e. pay cuts) is to accept the notion that working ­people – rather than spaceship-owning, billionaire mega-capitalists and fat cat bosses – should pick up the tab for the ­crisis of casino capitalism.

To say that pay increases in line with or above inflation are themselves ­“inflationary” is palpable nonsense. There’s nothing inflationary about working people achieving pay rises that help them to stave off the worst excesses of massive hikes in the costs of essentials such as electricity, gas, petrol and food.

No-one’s had a pay rise yet, but ­inflation is rocketing. Meanwhile profits are ­surging while, crucially, investment is decreasing as a proportion of GDP.

I WROTE a column for The National recently in support of the industrial action by the train drivers’ union Aslef against the Scottish Government’s insulting offer to ScotRail staff. A few readers responded with outrage to my argument, saying that pay rises above or in line with inflation were a threat to the Holyrood government’s budget.

This gets to the heart of the matter. Do we, in the independence movement, see independence as an end in itself, which requires us to support the SNP – as the principal electoral vehicle of ­independence – at all costs?

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Or, is independence a means to an end, the basis for creating a Scotland that is egalitarian, internationalist, republican and ferociously opposed to inequality and poverty? If it is the latter, that has to start in the here and now.

Independence cannot be justice ­deferred. We must, as the late Alasdair Gray put it, “work as if we live in the early days of a better nation”.

That means supporting every struggle and every campaign to defend ­working class people from the ravages of the ­iniquitous capitalist system in which we live. If history teaches us anything it is that the trade unions are the key ­instrument of workers in defending their interests.

If we want to live in a progressive, ­independent Scotland in the near future, we must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with striking trade unionists now, whether their employer is a private corporation, the Tory government at Westminster or, indeed, the SNP-Green administration at Holyrood.