Labour’s striking attack

Quite some claim from Ed Balls, writing in the Sunday Mirror today. “Let’s be clear what George Osborne’s game is,” he blusters, “he’s trying to pick a fight about pensions, provoke strikes and persuade the public to blame the stalling economy on the unions.” And it is a charge that Andy Burnham repeated on Dermot Murnaghan’s Sky show earlier. I was on live-tweeting duty, and lost count of how many times the shadow education secretary used phrases such as “provocation,” “confrontation,” “playing politics,” and “back to the 1980s.” This, clearly, is an attack that Labour are determined to push as relentlessly as possible. George Osborne is politicking, they are saying, at the nation’s expense.

It is, at the very least, an intriguing gambit on Labour’s part. What it’s attempting is nothing less than a grand realignment in British public opinion: shifting blame for the strikes from the unions to the government.