The Tories are trying, but there is no rage to be found for strikers

The same old dance is happening but the tune has changed. Ambulance and hospital staff are striking, the usual right-wing newspapers and talking heads are seizing an opportunity to attack the Labour Party and the trade unions – but it just isn’t working.

The Daily Mail rants at the unions on its front page, attempting to stoke up fury among the public against the people who drive their ambulances, but there is no fury to be found. There was precious little fury when they tried it with the train drivers either.

Steve Barclay, the health secretary, has been spending the day visiting hospitals, where he has been told, over and over again, by patients and by the parents of unwell children, that the care they receive is outstanding but they need more money. As much as they are desperate to make it so, there is no rage to be found against poorly paid hospital staff who are struggling just as much as everybody else, if not more so.

The anger is at the government and rightly so. Steve Barclay can go round as many hospitals as he likes and do his very best sympathetic stare into the eyes of some unfortunate child, but he also voted and campaigned for Brexit. Research published today by The Independent indicates the economy is 5.5 per cent smaller than it should be as a direct consequence – somewhere between £33bn and £40bn a year. That is real money that public services are having to do without.

It is also a direct cause of the historically high tax burden. When the economy is smaller, higher taxes are required. We have a prime minister who imagines himself to be some kind of low-tax Tory. But he remains very much in favour of a catastrophic policy that makes higher taxes inevitable. It was forewarned. It has come to pass. It would always be this way and now it is.

The absolute state of Britain is very much the Tories’ own doing, and the people know it. It has been a very long time since we’ve been here before. A quarter of a century at least. There is not much by way of precedent for how the right-wing mob behave in the years after the tyres have exploded but the car’s not come to a stop.

What are they meant to say, what are they meant to do, when they’re so entirely finished, but have to carry on?

At the weekend, the Mail on Sunday blamed imminent fuel shortages on the Met Office, for failing to predict last week’s cold snap (for added insanity, they blamed it on too many people working from home). The Met Office has responded by publishing links to Daily Mail stories from two months ago, in which the Met Office predicted a cold snap in December.

Elsewhere, the country’s problems are being put on the ex-footballer Gary Neville. It is utterly desperate stuff, and the desperation is not going to go away.

Public sympathy, on this rare occasion, appears to lie entirely with the striking workers. The attempts to create any kind of illusion as to how and why we got here are as desperate as they are absurd. And they are unsurprisingly unsuccessful.

It is not hard to work out that there is a distinct difference between a cancelled train and a cancelled ambulance. People do not blame paramedics, who are doing their best in impossible circumstances. People listen to the countless arguments put forward by striking medics – that their action is as much to do with their inability to provide an acceptable service as it is their own salaries – and they agree with them.

People, of course, have a right to expect better from their government. But they gave up on that expectation. They simply want rid of them. And the more ridiculous the attempts to defend them become, the more certain they will be in that conviction.