In the context of a serious crisis due to rising living costs, with inflation hitting 10.5% in December, the UK has seen strikes multiply for months in many sectors.

After two historic strike days in December and another two in January, thousands of nurses are planning to strike again on 6 and 7 February in the UK.

The ambulance staff union, GMB, which includes paramedics and telephone operators, had announced on Wednesday that it would join the action on February 6. And this Friday, another union, Unite, reported that thousands of its ambulance workers would also do so in England and Wales, threatening the biggest strike since the founding of public health in 1948.

England’s public health system, or NHS, is in deep crisis after years of underfunding under successive Conservative governments.

Its professionals, under immense pressure due to personnel shortages and losing purchasing power as their wages had risen under years of inflation, en masse left the sector with tens of thousands of vacant positions.

Rishi Sunak’s conservative government accuses strikers of endangering patients and wants to introduce minimal services in some areas.

“Instead of acting to protect the NHS and negotiate an end to the conflict, the government has coyly chosen to demonize ambulance staff,” Unite Secretary General Sharon Graham said in a statement.

“It’s not unions breaching minimum service levels: it’s the government’s disastrous management of the NHS that has brought it to breaking point,” he said.

Unite announced on Friday a total of ten days of new action by its ambulance workers in various parts of the country between the end of January and the end of March.