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I caught a bus to the Royal Liverpool Hospital for 6am. When I got off, the driver assumed I was a patient.“I don’t whether you know,“ she began to say,“but because of the pickets today…” Before she could explain that the buses would not be running past the Royal later I turned the UNISON Official Picket placard towards her. She was still convulsed with laughter as I got off.

The Keep Our NHS Public group had produced a leaflet linking the defense of NHS pensions to the defense of the NHS, and were sorting out distribution at the hospital with the Joint Staff-side. Between the Royal, Broadgreen, the Battle Bus, and the demo, 6,000 leaflets went out.

Staff told us that when the BBC Panorama programme on PFI went out on Monday night, the senior Execs hadn’t known so they weren’t ready for the media calls in the morning. The IT dept was installing iPlayer on their computers so they could watch the replay. The Chief Exec sent all staff a 2 page memo claiming the programme was bollocks.

By 6:45 I was at the Walk-In Centre, where several of us from Liverpool Community Health had been assigned to picket. Joe was already there. The nurse in charge for the day, an RCN member, was just opening the door. I tried my speech. LCH had issued a bulletin last week, in line with national guidance from NHS Employers, explaining that protection against unfair dismissal would extend to any worker, union or non-union, who decided not to cross a picket line. So here we were, asking her not to cross. She went in anyway, and came back with cups of tea throughout the morning.

But when the delivery van turned up with milk for the Centre, he was informed that this was an official picket line… and he got back in the cab and drove off. A patient approached us and decided he did not have an emergency and would come back tomorrow. It was his idea, not ours. As we later heard, two UNISON nurses, all but one of the receptionists, and the cleaners were on strike here.

The general public was very supportive (“Don’t believe the Daily Mail, we’re with you“,“Carry on lad“,“I hope you win“), and that continued throughout the day. Later, when the demo swept close to Liverpool One, hundreds of shoppers lined the pavement, applauding.

A number of the sacked dockers, including Jimmy Nolan, were on the march. I ran into Sylvia Tighe, healthworker and veteran of Women of the Waterfront, at St George’s plateau. That’s where the mass meetings of the 1911 Transport Strike were attacked, as Anne Gorton of the National Pensioners Convention reminded us.

PCS National Vice president Paula Brown called for an urgent meeting of all unions in the dispute, and the next strike date to be named.

It’s been a long time coming, but it felt like Liverpool has come back to life.