Unions and Us

Most Labour Party members have a similar view to me, in that they support unions but don’t support strikes. That’s not to say that strikes should never happen, just that we regard it as a failure of both sides when they do.

However, there comes a time when the sheer provocation of this Tory-led government towards the unions effectively forces us to be vocal and to stick up for our friends in the same way as they stick up for us.
We’ve had Vince cable threatening the unions with laws to weaken their powers, when in fact if their powers were reduced anymore then strikes will be made illegal in practice, even if they remain legal in theory.
Michael Gove, on The Andrew Marr Show, said that teachers risk their reputations by going on strike. He said:
Andrew Marr Show
“The reputation of teachers is not as high as it should be. They do an amazing job, but in other countries teaching is a high prestige profession. In recent years we’ve been moving in that direction. I think more and more respect has been accorded to teachers. But I do worry that taking industrial action, being on the picket line, being involved in this sort of militancy will actually mean that the respect that teachers should be held will be taken back a bit.”

Thanks, Michael, but my sister’s a teacher. Are you calling her a militant? She’s paid into her pension for twenty five years and is now being told that the agreement made at the start of her career is now to be torn up. She is rightly furious. Are you saying that her professional reputation should be damaged due to the fact that she has an objection to this?

He then went on to agree with Vince Cable’s previous provocation.

“I think legislation has to be kept under review. I think the person who put it best was Vince Cable, when he went to the GMB. Now nobody can accuse Vince of being Norman Tebbit’s younger brother, but Vince is perfectly clear. If the public are inconvenienced, then the demand from the public will be for some sort of change whether it is in the law or whatever in order to ensure that we don’t have militancy.”

When it comes to the teachers, I think that Michael Gove is hopelessly off course. Parents have a relationship with their child’s teacher. Seeing that teacher being treated unfairly is hardly going to cause parents to turn against them.

Nor for that matter are parents going to act as strike breakers by going into schools and ensuring that they carry on running, which is what Mr Gove proposed in a letter the other day, before trying to backtrack on the Marr show. It would be naive to imagine that any parent would be willing to damage their relationship with their child’s teacher, but maybe Mr Gove hasn’t considered something as obvious as that.

When it comes to pensions of teachers and other public sector workers, there is an issue of life longetivety that needs to be addressed, but probably should not be applied to people who are due to retire in the next few years and haven’t had time to rework their plans.

As Ed Balls said, the government want to create a strike because they think it will make them look strong. I think Ed Balls is correct in his analysis, but the government are incorrect in theirs.

This is not the 1980s. Unions are not an out of control force for malice, taking on governments out of contempt for their democratic mandate. Our unions are some of the most co-operative and reasonable in the world. But the government wish them to be something else. They want them to be on strike. They want confrontation because they think it makes them look strong, when in fact it demonstrates their weakness, because confrontation is not an end in itself.

The government should stick to the dialogue and listen to their concerns. The threats, insults and disdain that the Tories want to express achieve nothing other than to cause people to be more sympathetic to the employees in this situation.

I advise Michael Gove and Vince Cable to grow up, sit down, and talk.

Unions and Us

Most Labour Party members have a similar view to me, in that they support unions but don’t support strikes. That’s not to say that strikes should never happen, just that we regard it as a failure of both sides when they do.

However, there comes a time when the sheer provocation of this Tory-led government towards the unions effectively forces us to be vocal and to stick up for our friends in the same way as they stick up for us.
We’ve had Vince cable threatening the unions with laws to weaken their powers, when in fact if their powers were reduced anymore then strikes will be made illegal in practice, even if they remain legal in theory.
Michael Gove, on The Andrew Marr Show, said that teachers risk their reputations by going on strike. He said:
Andrew Marr Show
“The reputation of teachers is not as high as it should be. They do an amazing job, but in other countries teaching is a high prestige profession. In recent years we’ve been moving in that direction. I think more and more respect has been accorded to teachers. But I do worry that taking industrial action, being on the picket line, being involved in this sort of militancy will actually mean that the respect that teachers should be held will be taken back a bit.”

Thanks, Michael, but my sister’s a teacher. Are you calling her a militant? She’s paid into her pension for twenty five years and is now being told that the agreement made at the start of her career is now to be torn up. She is rightly furious. Are you saying that her professional reputation should be damaged due to the fact that she has an objection to this?

He then went on to agree with Vince Cable’s previous provocation.

“I think legislation has to be kept under review. I think the person who put it best was Vince Cable, when he went to the GMB. Now nobody can accuse Vince of being Norman Tebbit’s younger brother, but Vince is perfectly clear. If the public are inconvenienced, then the demand from the public will be for some sort of change whether it is in the law or whatever in order to ensure that we don’t have militancy.”

When it comes to the teachers, I think that Michael Gove is hopelessly off course. Parents have a relationship with their child’s teacher. Seeing that teacher being treated unfairly is hardly going to cause parents to turn against them.

Nor for that matter are parents going to act as strike breakers by going into schools and ensuring that they carry on running, which is what Mr Gove proposed in a letter the other day, before trying to backtrack on the Marr show. It would be naive to imagine that any parent would be willing to damage their relationship with their child’s teacher, but maybe Mr Gove hasn’t considered something as obvious as that.

When it comes to pensions of teachers and other public sector workers, there is an issue of life longetivety that needs to be addressed, but probably should not be applied to people who are due to retire in the next few years and haven’t had time to rework their plans.

As Ed Balls said, the government want to create a strike because they think it will make them look strong. I think Ed Balls is correct in his analysis, but the government are incorrect in theirs.

This is not the 1980s. Unions are not an out of control force for malice, taking on governments out of contempt for their democratic mandate. Our unions are some of the most co-operative and reasonable in the world. But the government wish them to be something else. They want them to be on strike. They want confrontation because they think it makes them look strong, when in fact it demonstrates their weakness, because confrontation is not an end in itself.

The government should stick to the dialogue and listen to their concerns. The threats, insults and disdain that the Tories want to express achieve nothing other than to cause people to be more sympathetic to the employees in this situation.

I advise Michael Gove and Vince Cable to grow up, sit down, and talk.

Tory Financial Regulation, or Incompetence?

So much for Tory boasts of their prowess at financial regulation. One year on from the birth of this government and financial investments of the world’s major institutional players are just as entangled and interwoven as they were at the time of the crisis. The fog has not cleared. If anything, it’s thickened into a pea-souper.

A photo from my kitchen window

If Greece were to default on her bonds, no one knows what the effect will be. We know who holds the bonds; that’s a public record. But we don’t know who has insured against their default, because apparently, that’s not.

War for Oil?

When I look back at the wars that Britain has fought in my lifetime, from The Falklands through to Libya, four out of six were in oil rich territories.

The reason this is interesting is because when the left are often dismissed when they argue that a conflict is “about oil”. But how can we dismiss such a striking statistic? I was born before the oil-spikes of the 70s, by the way.

The Falklands (1982) has massive reserves of oil and gas. Although it is remote and difficult to reach, the high oil price has recently made it commercially viable and there is now a North Sea rig, which had been towed down to the South Atlantic at a cost of $250,000 a day, just in the hire charges alone. They are drilling as we speak.

Prime Minister Thatcher told us that the war was fought purely on a point of principle; to take a stand against an aggressive military dictator. I don’t dispute that there was a principle, but it is curious that massive mineral wealth happened to exist in exactly the place that this point of principle was to be made.