The season of goodwill is supposed to be in full flow, but it is not only the British weather that is gloomy, but much of the public atmosphere, as well. The rising cost of living is biting hard, especially for those who were struggling even before inflation went wild. More generally, there is a sense that the country is going backwards, and is divided and increasingly unequal, with a realization by much of the public that the captain and crew of this ship are leading us straight to an iceberg. After years of only occasional industrial action by workers in the public sector and essential services, the floodgates of strikes by nurses, ambulance drivers, rail and postal workers, bus drivers, teachers, Border Force staff, university employees and civil servants have opened wide. A winter of discontent the like of which has not been seen for more than 40 years is upon us, and there is no end in sight. Different parts of the UK are affected differently, but the general picture is of many hundreds of thousands of dedicated people who play a central role in ensuring the functioning of our economy finding that they can no longer tolerate the huge gap between how society claims to appreciate their contributions and how little they are rewarded. They feel they are being pushed into poverty and expected to work under intolerable conditions. The government of new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is refusing to negotiate with the trade unions, and instead threatening to introduce anti-strike laws, audaciously claiming to be protecting people’s lives and minimizing disruption to their livelihoods, as if the strikers are not actually the backbone of the very people the government pretends to represent. It is only to be expected that a Tory government will be no friend of the trade unions or their members. Since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, there has been a concerted effort to severely limit the trade unions’ power as they go about their task of protecting their members’ working conditions and livelihoods. Needless to say, no one wants to see strikes, especially where lives may be lost and families prevented from traveling to see their loved ones to celebrate Christmas together after almost three years of pandemic. No one is more distressed by this dismal scenario than those who dedicate their lives to serving the wider community, in most cases for modest remuneration, but by now they have reached the end of their tether. While the public is far from united in its support for the strikers, nurses are backed by 60 percent of people in their first such action in the 74-year history of the National Health Service. There is no doubt that their strikes and those of ambulance drivers could be the most detrimental to the public. If a single lesson has been learned from the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, it is the readiness of all NHS medics to work under impossible conditions and risk their lives, even without protective equipment, as did nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, as well as teachers who adjusted to remote teaching almost instantly, and later put themselves at risk to teach unvaccinated children. Shamefully, the British government is using underhand tactics against the strikers, which include plans to put legislation in place to prohibit essential services from striking, plainly inciting against them, belittling and even delegitimizing their predicament, and attempting to drive a wedge between them and the rest of the public. And in the case of public sector workers, refusing to engage with them in negotiations over pay and conditions. On the selected days when nurses and ambulance drivers walk out, Will Quince, the health minister, is advising people, patronizingly, not to plan any risky activity, whatever their occupation. He should instead be engaging in round-the-clock talks with health workers in order to bring the various disputes to a speedy resolution. It is an open secret to everyone in the UK that in recent years services have been rapidly deteriorating in both the public and private sectors, and the situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic and by Brexit. But this is also a result of sheer greed and incompetence on the part of successive governments over the past 12 years. It should be added that misguided ideology plays a significant role, too. It inflicted Brexit in the first place, which accounts for many of the shortages in the labor market and also the ingrained, but baseless, belief that the private sector is superior and more cost-effective than its public counterpart, regardless of how appalling and immoral the former’s employment conditions often are.