The Strike

The greatest strike since the General Strike did not materialise and has been a damp squib. What a waste of time for those who went on strike and the rest of us although buses, the underground and trains were all working perfectly well. The only evidence of a strike that I saw were two young females with strike stickers on their jackets, schoolchildren and their mothers on the bus going out to lunch and an open top bus with union flags belting out music and only ten people on board. The strike was a token effort since most people know that the gold plated pensions of those working in the public sector simply cannot be justified and are grossly unfair on the rest of us. Miliband failed yet again at PMQs. You would have thought his union supporters would have kept him informed about the meetings they were having with the government. They had not told him a meeting had been held yesterday, that another was planned for tomorrow and another for Friday. He was left flat footed having accused the government of not having had a meeting since 4 November. The strike has probably done the unions no favours particularly as it came a day after the Autumn Statement. The latter has left many of us angry about the euro and the stupidity of those who brought it into existence, angry with the previous administration for the debt mountain they created and worried about how we are going to survive the retrenchment that is going to last for at least 6 years. On reflection I think I was a bit hard on Osborne yesterday. He has done some things with which I disagree but he has also done some brave things including a reduction in the civil service back to a more manageable size. The number of ministers also needs to be reduced to a more manageable size - the current number arose because governments always like to keep their supporters close in order to gag them. In this so called age of transparency it should be a point of honour to allow much more discretion to backbenchers. There will be less of them anyway after the next election as by then the number of MPs will have been reduced by 50.