Summer of discontent?

I was expecting a sense of déjà vu from the Big Strike, but it was not to be. It seems we can’t even organise a good industrial dispute anymore, never mind the oxymoronic ‘day of action’.

 

 

Where were the braziers? Where were the SWP banners? The colliery bands? The chants of ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – out, out, out’? ‘Toot if you support us’ to passing vehicles? What happened to the ‘Summer of Discontent’ in the land of lost content?

 

 

I tell you, the country is going to the dogs. True there were some resonances  from the past – the Marxist and SWP union bosses; Bob Crowe, the Essex thug  who lives high off the hog on a £140,000 a year stipend in a public rented house. But the turnout was about 100,000 from a total public service of over 6 million.

 

 

But there are a couple of factors that seem to have been overlooked.

 

 

Most of the 6,250,000 members of the public service face a later retirement age than they bargained for when they signed-up, (necessary maybe but still a massive breach of faith), loss of the final salary pension in favour of the career average (same as the private sector), and the index-linking changed from CPI to the less favourable RPI (which has already happened with existing pensioners).

 

 

But there is one group of public servants, 650 of them, who will retain all of these including a pension pot double that of the rest. And who might they be?

 

 

Why, MPs, of course!

 

 

And then there is the interesting fact that the total of public spending cuts is about the same as the overseas aid budget.