So how did you dodge the tube strike? Did you engage in unarmed combat for the bus, lace up your trainers and walk, irritate the hell out of proper cyclists by wobbling in on a bike that hasn’t seen action since the last strike? Or did you simply take the precaution of being one of the 56 million people who don’t live in London and thought: jeez, get over yourselves, since when is a few trains not running a national emergency?

Londoners face delays as all underground lines affected by strike Read more

If it’s the latter, you can stop feeling quite so smug. For even if this strike hasn’t touched your life directly (and I write as someone currently poring over coach timetables, thanks to First Great Western trains through Oxfordshire being on strike too) it may yet do so indirectly. This was the first major strike under a Conservative-run government already committed to making it harder for workers in “essential public services” (including transport) to take industrial action. All ministers were lacking was a bogeyman to provide some cover for this nakedly political wheeze. Bang on cue – the day after the budget condemned public sector workers to another four years of 1% pay rises, something many will wish to fight – the RMT delivered, stopping its services after a row over pay and new night-time services.

But the idea that Britain is being held hostage by militant unions who desperately need taming is a myth and sheer rightwing nostalgia. Days lost to strike in 2013 were running at 443,600 – which is still lower than the average for the boom years of the noughties, and pales into insignificance compared to a peak of just over 29m days lost the year Margaret Thatcher took office.

Industrial unrest is arguably one of the least urgent economic problems facing this government. Tube workers aside, only teachers and firefighters have caused any real national inconvenience since 2010 and even then they usually did so for just a day at a time (although a day is tough enough for working parents scrabbling around for emergency childcare). The private fear expressed by some senior Tories before taking office – that public sector unions would rise up against austerity so ferociously that the police would have to be mobilised, as they were against the miners – came to nothing. Interestingly, private sector workers were responsible for more stoppages in 2013 than those in the public sector.

So there’s no real, pressing reason for this crackdown beyond harking romantically back to the ghost of Thatcher. Given how long it took Boris Johnson to make up his mind before he fumed and spluttered about changing the law, one suspects even Downing Street also realises this.

All of which leaves the anti-strike legislation David Cameron was eventually persuaded to include in May’s Queen’s speech – requiring a 50% turnout in ballots and the backing of 40% of those eligible to vote before industrial action would be legal – resembling a sledgehammer lacking a nut. Or it would if it wasn’t for the RMT.

The irony is that for once the union’s resistance against plans to keep the underground running all night isn’t that unreasonable – which is why it has been joined this time by more moderate unions including ASLEF. Night shifts are unsociable, unhealthy, and potentially dangerous where they lead to overtiredness. (Although London Underground insists that two-thirds of drivers won’t be affected by the night tube and that for those who are, in most cases that means only a few extra nights a year; it has also offered, although at the last minute, a 2% pay rise plus a £500 bonus). Like Uber, whose “surge pricing” model saw cab fares triple during the strike, tube drivers are undoubtedly exploiting the fact that they have passengers over a barrel – but at least for tube drivers it isn’t just about the money.

The problem is that too many of London’s commuters are no longer listening to this argument. The union has cried wolf so often before that it could be eaten alive now for all many passengers care. Years of strikes every few months haven’t built sympathy so much as turned Londoners into more skilful and determined strikebreakers; loading up on podcasts for the long walk home, lugging Thermos flasks of tea to the bus stop, venting their frustration by posting indignantly on Facebook about how tube drivers already earn more than some doctors.

Strike days increasingly just serve to differentiate those lucky professionals who can work from home – the lawyers and management consultants and creatives who presumably sat the whole thing out in the garden with their laptops, listening to the Ashes – from the unlucky ones whose jobs require physical presence: shop assistants and cleaners and carers, and the police officers trying to keep order at overcrowded bus stops. Even Labour voters, according to one recent poll, now narrowly favour making it harder to strike.

The uncomfortable feeling remains that tube drivers are not actually more monstrously mistreated than anyone else

And that spells a looming challenge for the left, already forced on to the defensive by George Osborne’s admittedly disingenuous pitch this week to be the champion of the workers. So far, Labour’s response has been largely to mumble into its shoes, with even the normally loquacious mayoral and leadership candidates hardly rushing to the microphones.

Nobody wants to be a scab, but the uncomfortable feeling remains that tube drivers are not actually more monstrously mistreated than anyone else; that they only strike so often because they can, and because it works.

And that’s what the RMT has demonstrated by repeatedly shutting down the city and jacking members’ pay up to enviable heights; that the right to strike is an extraordinarily powerful thing. Without it, employees are defenceless in the face of exploitation, which is why being able to withdraw one’s labour is essential to civilised society. But it’s precisely because it’s such a powerful weapon that striking shouldn’t be abused.

Supporting the right to free speech doesn’t mean defending every idiot shouting “fire!” in a theatre, and similarly supporting the right to strike shouldn’t have to mean automatically endorsing every walkout. But if the union movement isn’t to end up inadvertently rolling the pitch for its own destruction, then that goes double in the current climate.

An effective defence of the right to strike now must include recognising when that right is being abused, to the point of potentially jeopardising other people’s rights in future. Or to put it another way: strikers can only expect solidarity from the millions still at work if they remember to show some solidarity in return.