If post-COVID Britain can be defined by one constant, besides its political farce and economic implosion, it has been sustained strike action. Why are Brits walking off the job? Well, take your pick. If the economic fallout of Brexit-induced inertia, the pandemic, and a European war weren’t enough, they were followed by an inflationary cost-of-living crisis, and the fever dream that was Liz Truss’s premiership. And it was all underpinned by stagnant wages and over a decade of Tory austerity that has carved public services to the bone.

This combination of conditions has revitalized trade unionism in a way the British political and cultural mainstream long thought impossible. Since COVID-19 hit, industrial terminology has returned to political discourse: ballots, strike dates, picket lines, and, above all, trade union leaders have been brought back into public consciousness. True, the Labour Party has been purged of its Left as it scurries to the perceived safety of the hallowed center ground. Yet, figures such as Mick Lynch of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), who spoke to Jacobin last year; Mick Whelan, general secretary of the train drivers’ Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF); and Sharon Graham, general secretary of multisector union Unite, have filled the ideological vacuum.

But this cohort of union leaders has something else in common: their roots. More specifically, their Irish backgrounds. In fact, a disproportionately large number of Britain’s trade union leaders are the sons and daughters of Irish immigrants. Now this generation, born in England in the 1950s and 1960s, raised during the Troubles, and shaped by the long shadow of Thatcherism, is spearheading the leftist challenge to Britain’s socioeconomic settlement and, unlike the Labour Party, refuses to kowtow to Britain’s media establishment and economic orthodoxies.