From the archives – striking matters

This week, there have been calls for certain public sector strikes to be made unlawful, Tube strikes and, today, the firemen have called off their strike having ‘listened to the concerns of the public’. It is all so 2002.

Go To Blazes, The Spectator, 26 October 2002

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, remain lowly paid bogeymen for the Winter of Discontent, when the ‘dead went unburied’.