Turns out Game of Thrones was right after all. Winter has come. Snow, ice and strikes. Welcome to Christmas 2022. Don’t bother sending any Christmas cards or try to catch a train to visit the in-laws. There’s every possibility that neither the cards nor you will make it.

It’s the winter of discontent. The sequel. In 1979 the bin men and the undertakers did for James Callaghan’s government. Will the RMT and the posties do for Rishi Sunak? 

Frankly, we can only hope so. Because the UK badly needs a reset. Our transport system, our NHS, our postal service are all failing (these strikes are not only about pay), our rivers are full of sewage (in England and Wales in particular, but it’s happening in Scotland too). The UK faces the highest energy bills in the world. Northern Ireland doesn’t have a functioning government. The increasing need for emergency parcels from food banks nationwide should be a national scandal. 

Crisis, what crisis? Just look around.

The zombie government we have in Westminster is, it should be clear by now, not in any way fit to face the challenges we face. Many of those challenges, after all, are the result of the policies they have enacted over the last decade, from austerity to Brexit. 

If the Tories had any shame they would have resigned en masse after the debacle that was Liz Truss’s truncated premiership. But on they trudge, trying to score petty political points on the strikes and making speeches about immigration, attacking the European Court of Human Rights and engaging in voter suppression at a cost of £180 million over the next decade. Culture wars and union baiting. It’s all they’re good for. Can we really take two more years of this?

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