One Out, All Out

Yvette Cooper's complaint that there is to be no retention of provision to bang people up without charge for an entire month "in case of emergency" is as clear an indication as you could want that, while Labour may be on the way back to being Labour, it is not yet there, and it probably will not be before electoral reform gives us all the opportunity to start again anyway. But this is not the only such indication.

Bob Crow is a far less significant figure than Arthur Scargill ever was, and even Scargill was essentially peripheral to the trade union movement. If Crow and his union were calling strikes, however disruptive, anywhere else, then he, it and they would be completely ignored by the "national" media. The RMT is no longer affiliated to the Labour Party, although it did fund a small Hard Left, Welsh separatist party the only ever Leader of which, until as late as January of this year, was recently welcomed with open arms and considerable fanfare by David Cameron, although that Hard Left, Welsh separatist, RMT-funded, and indeed Tommy Sheridan-endorsed party is still the one listed next to his name on the list of former MPs who continue to hold House of Commons passes.

But what if our anti-union laws were indeed to be made even more draconian, as desired by a sexually dissolute and pro-drugs Ottoman aristocrat of very recent extraction who has publicly recited the Shahada in Arabic, who was elected Mayor of London as a joint candidate with the BNP, and who surrounds himself with veterans of the Revolutionary Communist Party? If fifty per cent of those eligible would have to vote in favour of action, then why allow only such action as is permissible under the current legislation?

Why not allow, say, sympathetic action of a clearly secondary character, such as a work to rule in support of a strike, within a single industry or corporation? Provided, of course, that the fifty per cent threshold had been reached. The Eighties were a long time ago. And as the cuts are felt, these strikes are going to be very popular indeed, with the Government, not the unions, identified by the public as its enemies. Think on.