Liz Truss’s stubborn militancy promises more disruption and division for Britain

Editorial: Ms Truss is going to find that Britain is becoming much more difficult to govern. It is not obvious she is up to the job

The foreign secretary’s obduracy, so reminiscent of Mrs Thatcher and so popular with her activists, is going to add to a sense of a national malaise (EPA)

Although talk of a British general strike is still the stuff of overheated media commentary, the wave of strikes in key sectors of the economy through the summer will be almost as disruptive, and as bitter, as anything since the great tragic miners’ strike of 1984-85.

In an advanced, highly interdependent modern economy it does not take much, or many unhappy unionised workers, to cause disproportionate damage to a delicately balanced industrial machine. So it has proved with the highly effective industrial action on the railways, and so it is about to be with the strike of workers at the country’s largest container port, Felixstowe. Add in disputes in hospitals – already under unbearable pressure – in courts, the postal service and elsewhere, and the country will soon live up to that old political slogan, “Britain isn’t working”.

A mere 1,900 workers at Felixstowe find themselves in an enormously powerful position in relation to their numbers. They have the capacity, because of their pivotal position and because of Britain’s dependence on imports and exports to make a living, to cause significant disruption to supply chains and to add to the costs of businesses, large and small, throughout the economy. In the kind of belligerent language favoured by ministers and their allies in the press, they can “hold the country to ransom”.