GO TO BLAZES

Any public-sector union contemplating a strike is best advised to start by targeting children’s bookshops. It is remarkable how groups of workers who first impinge on the consciousness through the pages of nursery books manage to command greater public affection and higher wage settlements than those who do not. Nurses and train-drivers have done particularly well out of recent pay disputes. Municipal grave-diggers, by contrast, not only remain lowly paid operatives; they also continue to be held as chief bogeymen for the Winter of Discontent, when the ‘dead went unburied’.

Fireman Sam, as represented by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), is well aware of the power of public opinion. The union held its first vote on strike action on 11 September, while the world was commemorating the heroism of the New York Fire Department. Ever since then, a steady troupe of miserable firemen has been paraded before the press, bemoaning that they do not have enough money for life’s little luxuries and that they cannot afford a decent house in London. Remarkably, given the contempt which the public still holds for the bolshie strikers of 1979, opinion polls still indicate much sympathy for the firemen, in spite of the outrageous size of their pay claim. Even in the militant 1970s the firemen demanded only a 30 per cent wage increase, and that was against a backdrop of double-digit inflation. No union of that era would have dared ask for an increase, in real terms, of 38 per cent. Yet that is what the FBU is demanding.