Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a new podcast from Politics Home.

I'm Alan Tolhurst and each week I'll be taking an in-depth look at the biggest political

stories of the week with fellow politics home reporters and special guests from across Westminster.

Join me this week are our political reporters, Eleanor Langford and Noah Hoffman,

and a Conservative MP Hugh Merriman who chairs the Transport Select Committee in the House of

Commons. This week, obviously, the big story is the strikes. We're recording this on

Wednesday afternoon. We've had the first day of industrial action. We've got two more days

planned for Thursday and also for Saturday, having walked out ahead of the

first strike on Monday, the RMT are now back in talks, but it doesn't seem particularly likely

that we're going to get much of a breakthrough, which means that we're going to have plenty

more industrial action. It was interesting to see what we're, the whole wider question of

public sector pay and whether actually, you know, people deserve to get an

inflation repay rise, given that inflation is upper and sort of 11%. So, you know, it's just kind of

interesting to see where that kind of is. And Ellie, what your kind of thoughts were around that?

Do you think we're kind of going to see much of a movement from the government on that?

They seem pretty clear that in line with inflation is simply going to make things worse a movement from the government on that? They seem pretty clear that

in line with inflation is simply going to make things worse, the kind of wage inflation spiral.

Yeah, they're pretty clear on that, but that is unfortunately what a lot of the unions are

asking for. We have some teaching unions today saying that they would like a at inflation pay rise,

and they're not going to get that. So there's going to be probably teacher strikes down the line and we're also looking at strikes in other sectors in the NHS even barristers are looking at

striking yeah there's all the same reason why the bus worker strike already come through and the postal

workers like a balloting for strikes as well and it's all the same reason it's all cuts in the company

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