No left turns

27 June, 2011 (10:24) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

You’re not going to believe this. Trade union leaders earn money! Yes, it’s true. I read it in the Daily Mail. They earn big money – tens of thousands of pounds a year! They don’t give it all to the poor or needy, oh no, the hypocrites, they selfishly spend it on their mortgages and their families. Typical. They drive cars or take the train rather than walk to work on the bleeding stumps of their feet, wearing sackcloth and ashes.

What else do you expect? I mean, children are going to be unable to function in the adult world thanks to those Trotskyite teachers walking out on strike this week. I read it in the Telegraph. Thank God Michael Gove’s prepared to let people wander in off the street and look after the little darlings – at least somebody’s putting the children first, eh? And of course all those hard-line lefty civil servants, well, they’re just trying to protect their cushy little public sector number. Read it in the Express.

Sorry, what was that? What are a million people losing a day’s wage for? Just to be awkward, probably. To bring the country to its knees, that’s all. Back to the winter of discontent, that’s where we’re going. Bins piled in the streets. Dead left unburied. You know. They want more money for doing nothing. Read it in the Mail.

(By the way, it’s a little-known part of the employment laws introduced by successive governments that it is illegal for any journalist on any forum, including a humble blog like this, to discuss strike action without the use of phrases like ‘winter of discontent’ or ‘dead left unburied’.)

All these public sector workers. They have it so much better than the private sector. They have decent employment rights, fair pay, maternity leave, pensions, representation.

Obviously, there’s only one way to deal with the vast chasm between the decent terms and conditions of the public sector and the often exploitative, much poorer terms and conditions of the private sector. Sorry, what was that? Ensure that everybody has the same decent terms and conditions? Don’t be so stupid!

The only way to deal with this vast chasm is to make sure the public sector is exposed to the same cavalier workplace practices as the private sector, its working people summarily shorn of the advantages they have won. Obvious.

I mean, what would we be doing as a society if we placed the welfare of working people first? We’d all be communists, wouldn’t we?

Just look at some private sector industry sectors where the trade unions, the bolshie nuisances, remain strong: take the privatised rail industry. Network Rail, for example, has been brought to its knees by having to negotiate with trade unions – just £438 million in profit last year, that’s all. Poor First Great Western, it’s hard to see how they get by. Only £127.2 million in profit. All that hardship, and the responsibility of making sure the privatised industry offers a service that’s just as unpopular, inefficient and squalid as the old nationalised one.

Sorry, you think it would be helpful to listen to some of the issues that have driven these people to take such important action? How naïve of you. I know teachers and civil servants are those ‘ordinary working people’ Cameron keeps banging on about, but as soon as ‘ordinary working people’ stand up for themselves and each other they immediately and magically become ‘workshy scroungers’.

It really doesn’t help anybody to consider what it is that has driven normally moderate members of caring professions to such a pitch that they have gone through the lengthy and expensive business of withdrawing their labour: much better to drive the juggernaut of austerity blithely on, scattering to left and right the people who in their very polite English way are trying to say “Er… just a minute…”

Those lefties never think, do they? It’s obviously very necessary to raise people’s retirement age and ask them to work longer, because it will save the nation the expense of their pensions for a few more years.

That will be to everybody’s benefit, not just the benefit of the few public sector scroungers who would otherwise have got their hands on the money – isn’t that fairness for you? We’ll be able to spend the money we save on caring things like – oh, like paying the state benefits for all those young people who can’t get jobs because the jobs are occupied by people working longer because we’ve put up the retirement age. Union agitators never think things through.

And of course making public servants work longer for less is actually a very lefty policy in some areas, because it will save students having to pay back their loans and fees – they’ll never earn enough to start coughing up because they’ll never get a job.

Anyway, there we are. That’s discussed this week’s mass protest in the sort of responsible, thoughtful way so characteristic of what we’d like to call Britain’s free press. It only remains now for the Government to do what Governments often do in the face of mass action – ignore it. That, after all, is what Tony Blair so wisely did when faced with protests against the Iraq War, and look where that wise decision has got us.

Moving on… looking at pictures of so-called celebrities daintily dipping their wellies in the mud of Glastonbury, I wonder what would happen if D listers joined the strike action?

They couldn’t walk out, of course. They’d have to flounce out. Strike action would threaten share prices in paparazzi photographers and force the cancellation of important events like Katie Price’s ‘my new boyfriend’  photoshoots. If D list girls withdraw labour, levels of sexual frustration among premiership footballers may well result in spontaneous combustion. As a D lister himself, Labour leader Ed Miliband would have to join the picket lines.

And activists for pointless media celebrities would have to be interviewed: Cheryl Cole could fume: “We don’t know what they mean when they say we’re being irresponsible. We really don’t.”

And finally… it’s nice to hear feedback from you, but do feel free to use the comment facility here. Others may like to hear your views too.

Comments

Comment from Iain
Time June 27, 2011 at 12:06 pm

Ha ha!! Nice rant. Do we feel better now? No Left Turns is an apt title as I’m awaiting with baited breath for the Standard Governmental U Turn that we seem to frequently be on the receiving end of lately. As a lefty unionisti type myself, I am fully behind our upcoming winter of discontent, it is nearly July after all, and I will do my bit by also refusing to bury any dead!!! 5*

Comment from One Old Fiddle
Time June 27, 2011 at 1:06 pm

Look, Daily Mail. I found the cat tormenting a teenage rabbit in the shower room. I rescued it, but it was almost dead, so I carried it out to the garden. I think you should know that there is no way that I am going to bury it, if it is dead. So there. And if I came across the cat tormenting a banker….well…..I mean…….you would, wouldn’t you…

Comment from StentsRus
Time June 27, 2011 at 2:54 pm

They tried to bury me once…..survival down to personal skill?….medical excellence?….brilliant surgery?…..wrong…..turns out there was a gravediggers strike…..we want more festering corpses!….and if we don’t get them we’ll take a day off and watch the tennis…..so there!

Comment from Stuart
Time June 27, 2011 at 8:07 pm

Brilliant comments made me chuckle – thanks!

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