“The hospitality sector reckons it will lose around 1.5 billion. The Centre for Economics and Business Research estimates that strikes which stop people getting to work will, by themselves, cost Britain £700 million pounds of lost output.
“So folks I want to ask a question today – a genuine question, I don’t know the answer to it – does there come a time when the economic cost and human misery of these strikes are so great that the government should, frankly, just give in? Fold, and pay full inflation increases to all the key workers?”