AS THE late, great Bob Crow said: “If you fight you won’t always win. But if you don’t fight you will always lose.” Now, as current RMT general secretary Mick Lynch points out, his members accepted a wage freeze three years ago and two years ago but when they were offered zero again this year, plus far worse terms and conditions they decided enough was enough.

This sums up the experience of most workers not just over three years but ever since austerity was introduced by the Tory-led coalition in 2010. People’s budgets and their patience has been stretched to breaking point. Many just refuse to shoulder the financial burden of a crisis they did not create.

The same is true for millions of workers in the public sector including NHS workers and teachers but is also true of other transport workers and millions in the private sector. They simply cannot tolerate further attacks on their living standards.

We should be clear, these are orchestrated attacks, driven by policies from government, right-wing think tanks and the big businesses who fund them. This can be traced back to the coalition came to office in 2010 there was a barrage of propaganda on the need to reduce the deficit and the public-sector debt. There has barely been a let up since.

Yet in their very first budget Cameron and Osborne raised VAT (a regressive tax, mainly paid by people average and below-average incomes) while cutting taxes on big business and the rich by the same amount. This too has been the same pattern ever since.

In truth, austerity has always been about transferring incomes and wealth from workers and the poor to big business and the rich. The talk about the deficit and debt was always a smokescreen to mask that fundamental attack. In the last year of the Labour government and amid the global financial crisis the annual level of public borrowing was £160 billion and the total level of public-sector debt was £1,120 billion. Now these figures are £172 billion and £2,341 billion (according to data from the Office for National Statistics).

In my political lifetime there have been many such occasions when entirely spurious claims were made about the economy. There was the balance of payments and the IMF crisis, followed by shadowing the DeutscheMark, followed by monetarism, followed by deficit reduction.

Every single one of them entailed cuts to wages, especially public-sector wages, cuts to public services, cuts to welfare payments and reductions in the tax rates paid by big businesses and the rich. Only the label changes, the policies are constant.

The same is now true of the infamous “wage-price spiral.” Average wage settlements are running at 4 per cent while CPI inflation is now over 9 per cent. Simple logic tells that us that other factors, not wages must be pushing prices higher.

The reality is that it is the disastrous economic policy coming out of lockdown in the Western economies, especially the United States that has caused this surge in prices. If the rest of the world still catches a cold when the US sneezes, the US has allowed itself to catch a fever.

Two years ago US consumer prices were barely rising at all, up just 0.1 per cent from the previous year in May 2020. But from that point onwards they began to surge and inflation is now just under 9 per cent.

This rise in US prices occurred long before anything similar took place in other leading economies. It was domestically generated. In lockdown, the US government did the least of any major industrialised economy to support its own population through the crisis. Ten million people lost their jobs and wages stagnated.

This mean and heartless policy was then compounded by an utter reckless approach by creating vast amounts of money, hundreds of billions was handed over the private companies and households were sent cheques to spend, but only after lockdown was over and already back at work and spending.

The idea was that the banks and big business would benefit from the boom. Instead, the result was an inflation bonfire which has affected almost the whole world.

In this country, it is completely ridiculous to blame a “wage-price spiral” for the crisis. The vast majority of workers have had nothing but below-inflation pay rises for years. In the public sector the government has tried to establish a general “going rate” for pay across all sectors by pay freezes (also nothing to do with deficit reduction).

So much more is at stake in the rail workers’ dispute than the livelihoods of 80,000 members, important as they are. As the by-election results show, this is an unpopular government which has been continuing and deepening the attacks on workers and the poor of its predecessors.

I previously wrote in these pages about the importance of the attack by P&O on its workers, and the threat that posed to the entire labour movement. The hypocrisy of this government who pretended to care about the fate of P&O workers can be seen from the fact that it is trying to impose this on rail workers too.

A part of the “reform package” is that some grades will be fired and rehired on far worse contracts, all conditions, such as safety and overtime working will be made worse and there remains the threat of 2,900 job losses. The RMT has exposed the fact that the employers’ willingness to withdraw its letter threatening compulsory redundancies was blocked by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps.

It is the government that has picked this fight and is ensuring that a settlement cannot be reached. In 1983 a deeply unpopular Thatcher government was able to win an election by focusing on an external enemy, the Argentinian dictator General Galtieri. But it was not long after re-election that she publicly identified the NUM and Arthur Scargill as the “enemy within.” Lacking any ideas of its own, this government is hoping that history will repeat itself.

But things are very different now. Young people and the miners bore the brunt of Thatcherism, but otherwise incomes generally rose (thanks mainly to North Sea oil). That is not true this time around. It is evident in opinion polling which shows that the government stance on all key issues, from the strike, to Rwanda deportations, even to the war are not that popular.

Here the role of the rest of the labour movement is crucial. If a large section of the population believes we are united and determined to support all those willing to stand up to the government, they will follow. It may be a very long fight, but we could see off this government and the charlatan leading it. We could even turn the tide on austerity. Now, that is worth fighting for.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.