30 Nov 2011

A whiff of class warfare as MPs debate the strike

When curators at the Natural History Museum go on strike you get some very erudite banners.

As the government’s civil contingencies committee was told on Monday, there’s quite a regional differentiation to the strikes’ impact. I see Scotland’s got only 30 out of 2,700 schools open for St Andrew’s Day.

Some English counties have more than half of their schools open. The Whitehall call-up for volunteers to man the borders seems to have paid off for the government at Heathrow where travellers are talking about their best-ever whiz through passport control. There’s also been something like a 25 per cent drop in passenger numbers.

On the public sector pensions deal itself, the Chancellor yesterday effectively collected some public sector pension bunce by bringing forward the raised state pension age (for all) by a decade. One union general secretary pondered if the Chancellor would consider discreetly slipping a wad from that to Danny Alexander and Francis Maude to help with their negotiations? You wouldn’t bet on it.

Mark Serwotka is talking about how future strikes should replicate the Southampton dispute where action is targetted to maximise the difficulty for the employers and minimise the cash loss to workers – you get traffic wardens out, say, to deny the council income and then other workers compensate the traffic wardens for lost income.

Prime Minister’s Questions was dominated by what David Cameron called the “damp squib” strikes. It was quite a throwback to the 1980s.

David Cameron revived “left-wing” as a term of abuse for the Labour leader and even talked about Neil Kinnock.

Ed Miliband accused the Prime Minister of demonising dinner ladies who earn in a year what George Osborne spends on a week’s skiing holiday. Actually he mis-spoke, but that’s what he meant to say and the whiff of class warfare was clear for all to hear.

The PM mocked Ed Miliband for having condemned the June strike but giving warm words to today’s strikers. Ed Balls shouts “Flashman” across at David Cameron and one Tory MP said to me afterwards: “Cameron came across as an arrogant Flashman bully – but that’s because he’s dealing with a wretched, pathetic guttersnipe.” I’m not sure the Commons has really risen to events these last few weeks.

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