In a way, it would be rude for the unions not to strike later this month. They are in the business of changing government policy by threatening strike action. They had planned to wait until next year, when the cuts would be biting hardest, to force David Cameron into a Heath-style U-turn — but it seems the Prime Minister’s resolve is running out faster than they expected.
In a way, it would be rude for the unions not to strike later this month. They are in the business of changing government policy by threatening strike action. They had planned to wait until next year, when the cuts would be biting hardest, to force David Cameron into a Heath-style U-turn — but it seems the Prime Minister’s resolve is running out faster than they expected. Just a year into government and already he has torn up his flagship NHS reform, because Shirley Williams in the House of Lords was making dark threats. A perfectly sensible proposal to transfer ownership of some forests was axed after a successful campaign by Rachel Johnson of The Lady magazine. If the government can be beaten up by Boris Johnson’s little sister, then the unions must be eager to try an attack of their own.
The Prime Minister is, unusually, making a virtue of his U-turns. Abruptly reversing policies is, he says, a ‘sign of strength’ because ‘people respect a government that feels it is strong enough to say “hold on, we haven’t got every element right, we’re not taking enough people with us”’. The laddie is for turning, and seems proud of it. But this sets a new precedent. Failure to turn around the opinion polls is, it seems, now enough reason to abandon a policy — even one such as NHS reform, which has already survived two phases of House of Commons scrutiny.
The union barons will be watching open-mouthed. It would be dereliction of duty not to try their hand at this new game. Here is a Prime Minister who has recently appointed an opinion pollster as his chief strategist. To the unions, that is a sign that this government is navigating not by a compass needle but by whichever way the wind blows. To win, they need only change the political weather — by calling what might be the largest series of strikes in a generation.
This week’s specific union grievance, over pensions, is absurd. A civil servant on the national average pay of £23,000 can retire early with a £500,000 pension pot. Private sector workers can only dream of such sums, yet they are working longer so their public sector counterparts can retire earlier and on more generous terms. The unions’ claim, that high pensions compensate for low pay, is in no way true. Research by Policy Exchange shows the average public sector worker earns 25 per cent more, for every hour worked, doing the same job.
It is time for David Cameron’s government to play hardball, and this requires a change to the law. As the Mayor of London has suggested, strikes should only be legal if at least 50 per cent of the union members turn up to vote. The current London Underground strike is taking place with only 29 per cent of RMT members voting for it. The unions must be able to persuade at least half of their members to vote in any strike that will leave children untaught, bins unemptied, or trains unmanned. The failure to implement such a law will have predictable results. Teachers will threaten to strike during exam periods. Underground staff will strike weeks before the Olympics.
The hapless and divided Labour party has given the coalition a deceptive feeling of infallibility. But government is not simply a game of chess with Ed Miliband. It should be about providing discipline and direction for the march to fiscal sanity. On school milk, school sport, housing benefit, bin collections, knife crime sentencing and NHS reform, the government has shown that it buckles if enough pressure is applied. The battle against the unions is one it cannot afford to lose.
A law unto themselves
Joanne Fraill is probably not the sort of noble and upstanding person that the authors of the Magna Carta had in mind when they helped enshrine the right to trial by jury into English law in the 13th century.
This week she was facing a jail sentence after admitting to contacting via Facebook a defendant in the trial in which she was serving as a juror. Her ramblings — containing lines such as ‘Don’t worry about that charge, no way it can stay hung for me lol this is 2nd tim init. At least then yer all home n dry’ — caused the collapse of a drugs trial last December. Yet the actions of one semi-literate juror, and indeed other jurors who have been caught discussing trials on the internet, ought not to threaten the right to trial by jury, as some senior legal figures have implied this week. Christopher Kinch, the chairman of the Criminal Bar Association call the situation ‘a potential timebomb for the jury system’.
Some of the comments posted by jurors do betray a lack of suitability for the task. ‘Stuck in jury duty haha … Defo guilty,’ wrote one on his Facebook page. But something more sinister lies behind the hostility of certain judges and lawyers towards juries. For them, it is tiresome to have laymen partake in what they consider the remit of their profession. But juries are a useful guard against judicial dictatorship. Judges have already assumed too much power over libel and privacy. They should not be allowed to undermine the idea, written into the Magna Carta, that defendants should be tried by their peers, not by agents of the state.
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