The bin bags are piling up, the unions are flexing their muscles and Labour is floundering both in Birmingham and Westminster.
Welcome to the Summer of Discontent.
The trigger is a bitter bin strike in Birmingham. The city is broke, having suffered the biggest council bankruptcy in UK history, and is transforming into a third world city, according to furious Brummies.
Now its rubbish-strewn streets are becoming a symbol of broader national decay.
A long-running equal pay claim has blown a hole in the second city’s budget and sparked fury among bin workers, who’ve had their pay held down as a result.
Waste collection is now sporadic at best, and the streets are overrun with rats, waste and recriminations.
But the most worrying part is that Birmingham could just be the beginning. Hardline union leaders are threatening to spread their strikes across the rest of the country.
The potential for chaos is real.
Labour’s Wes Streeting called the mess in Birmingham “unacceptable”, but so far, ministers look helpless to stop it.
The government’s claim to have called in the army has been exposed as hollow, with just three military personnel deployed. This isn’t the time for futile gestures. This is serious.
Unite is on the march and has even snubbed pleas by Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner to put down their placards and stop the strikes.
That’s despite handing her £10,000 before the general election.
Yet at the same time, Rayner is about to make everything worse. Her forthcoming Employment Rights Bill will hand unions even more power.
You think they’d be grateful.
The echoes of the 1970s are growing louder by the day.
Back then, union strikes paralysed the country, famously preventing even the dead from being buried.
Then Labour PM Jim Callaghan’s infamous “Crisis? What crisis?” remark came to define a decade of economic pain and public sector breakdown.
We’re not quite there yet, but the direction of travel is worryingly familiar. The strikes could multiply, along with the rats.
The binmen’s strike stems from a tribunal ruling that waste collection and cleaning work are of “equal value” and should be paid the same.
It sounds fair, until councils find themselves unable to raise bin workers’ pay without also increasing wages elsewhere. It’s a bureaucratic minefield that threatens to entrench industrial unrest across the country.
Rayner’s planned Fair Work Agency will almost certainly become a magnet for more tribunal cases and equal pay claims, regardless of whether councils can afford them.
In the 1970s, the workers’ struggle was led by union barons like Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones. Today, we have Unite’s Sharon Graham, an increasingly familiar figure on our TV screens.
With a recession looming, public finances tightening and Donald Trump’s trade threats likely to compound economic anxiety, we’re likely to see a lot more of her.
Labour’s already cut benefits and is signalling tax rises in the autumn. With the nation’s finances on the edge, the alternative could be to go cap in hand to the IMF, again, just like in the 1970s.
Once again, Labour looks as though it’s being held hostage by the very unions that fund it.
We could be heading for long, hot summer, regardless of the weather. At least the rats will enjoy it. In fact, they’re already dancing in the streets.
