Another commute, another strike. As a new round of train strikes begins, it remains uncertain how far commuters and travellers can tell the difference between a strike day and a non-strike day. After all, given the endemic delays, disruption, overcrowding and general shabbiness of Britain’s railways, it can be hard to differentiate between a strike, a power outage, or a shortage of train staff. Where previously train strikes may have forced bosses to accept that their office employees would have to stay home and take the day off, the post-lockdown shift in working habits means there is now barely any such relief.

Taking into account the rise of working from home, combined with the decrepitude of Britain’s transport infrastructure, it is clear that the industrial strategy chosen by national transport unions — Aslef in the current round of strike action — is failing. For how can union action make a meaningful impact on the functioning of the economy, or on managers and railway bosses, when all the damage they seek to inflict simply dissipates into the ether of cyberspace and the broader national malaise?

While industrial strife may be trending upwards from its historic lows, the overall significance of this renewed labour militancy has yet to be determined. It is industrial strategy and political nous that will make the difference between reasserting the historic role of Britain’s workers and simply compounding the misery of living in modern Britain.

Thus far, the union leaders seem to be letting timidity guide them, avoiding a real battle in favour of these stop-and-start strikes, including one planned for the London Underground which was called off earlier this week, whose effect becomes increasingly tokenistic as time wears on. Worse, in the run-up to a general election the strikes simply add to a wider dissatisfaction with 14 years of Tory misrule, smoothing Labour’s path to sidle into power. While railway union leaders are supportive of Keir Starmer’s party — including Mick Lynch of the RMT, which has historically maintained more distance than others — an industrial strategy of symbolic strikes still makes little sense.

This is because, rather than forcing the Labour leadership to acknowledge union power, these strikes serve to erode Tory rule without exerting any meaningful leverage over Starmer’s party. They will not help to extract concessions for Britain’s workers from a future government, and will instead reassure the Opposition that unions will be compliant and quiescent under Starmer’s rule.

The new era of strikes offered a blessed relief after years of lockdown, showing a civil society re-emerging from national house arrest. It was also a reminder that there is still plenty of vital work in the modern economy that cannot be done over Zoom. This all now risks being lost, frittered away in figurative acts of protest that leave no lasting mark. Far from underscoring the role of Britain’s workers, it is an industrial approach more akin to the symbolic strikes pioneered by the Universities and College Union (UCU), which gouged members’ pay packets without damaging university managers.

While this strategy conformed to the outlook of middle-class professionals fond of virtue-signalling, it is less fitting for workers whose lives aren’t spent logging into online meetings. If the transport union leaders really want to show strength, they should ditch these pinprick strikes and mount an indefinite effort to paralyse the national railway system in its entirety. That would remind us all of the vital part played by Britain’s workers in sustaining the nation — and of the larger role they could play in national renewal if they were galvanised to do so.

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Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is author or editor of nine books, including most recently, The National Interest: Politics after Globalization (2025).

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