Subscriber The now definitively-ex PM might have thought, as he fought so desperately to save face outside Number 10 on July 7th, that he would be the British public figure on everyone's minds this summer. He didn't reckon with Mick Lynch.

RMT. CWU. NUJ. Unite. Unison. UCU. NEU. Even the Royal College of Nursing. Unions across the country - if they're not striking already - are balloting to join the most significant wave of UK industrial action since Thatcher. We remember, quite vividly, the first acts of Johnson's premiership, three years ago: pledging to increase police powers while discrediting and disrupting the parliamentary process. Textbook authoritarianism. Now, in her attempts to one-up her predecessor, Truss is taking a leaf out of Trump's book by undermining the press at every opportunity, while promising to crack down on unions. 

Three years ago we had a left-wing Labour leadership which, despite its eventual electoral failings, brought the radical idea that the government should serve the people back into mainstream discussion, after decades of neo-liberal deflection. Now, Labour has abandoned its principles in an attempt to invoke the imagined glory of Blair and Brown. There is, however, a new kind of leadership to rally around. The kind that is elected and held to account by organised working people. The kind that is unafraid to talk openly about the possibility of a general strike. The kind that the barbs of the right-wing press bounce off of. Their message is simple: we have had enough. At an RMT rally last Wednesday, Bernie Sanders restated the centrality of international solidarity in workers' movements. At the Burston School Strike Rally on Sunday, Lynch and Corbyn joined the hundreds gathered in the Norfolk village to reflect on and celebrate the longest single act of industrial action in UK history. At the Enough is Enough campaign rally in Norwich on Tuesday - one of a series across the country that have drawn huge crowds - local Acorn activist Denzil Dean described the "thriving, varied, joyful movement" that is fighting back against a cost-of-living crisis caused by the greed of the wealthy.

Closing that rally, protest singer Grace Petrie led the crowd in a chorus with a familiar refrain, heard on picket lines up and down the country for decades:

"The union makes us strong."

It's a tune that, we assume, has never passed the new PM's lips. She will learn its meaning soon enough.

Solidarity,
The Norwich Radical Editorial Team Most Read Articles in August Want to change how you receive these emails?
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