The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.

This is a global player original podcast.

It was pickets, not patience for these paramedics in Liverpool yesterday.

Now there'll be two further days of strike action for Unison members, walking out again

on January 11th and 23rd they announced this evening.

Another winter, another strike, except this time, longer than any other in the NHS's history.

February 1st, an estimated 300,000 teachers across the UK walk out for higher pay.

Millions of children forced to miss class as more than half of English schools were either

partially or fully closed.

More travel misery is on the way for rail commuters after the RMT union announced another

wave of strike action.

Those are just a few of the strikes which have punctuated our lives and sometimes livelihoods

over the past two years or so. More are to come. On Friday, junior doctors announced a new wave

of strikes for late February. Britain has lived through its longest and deepest period of industrial

unrest since the 1970s and 80s, about four million working days lost up to August 23 alone. What is

surprising is the extent to which none of it seems surprising anymore. The man who in so many ways has been the face of this spring and summer and autumn and winter,

and spring and summer again of discontent, has of course been Mick Lynch,

the General Secretary of the RMT, the Railway Union.

Whatever you think of his politics, which is avowedly socialist,

he has been a powerful and impressive

adversary of ministers and persuasive advocate on behalf of his members, taking his place

in the pantheon of our most well-known trade union leaders, Ernie Bevan, Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlan,

...