Not all right Jack

Peter Oborne in his Mail column conducts a telling thought experiment:

“Yesterday morning witnessed a summit in Whitehall between Cabinet ministers and the country’s biggest union barons.

Top of the agenda was a series of arrogant demands from the unions for control over government policy in return for funding a bankrupt Labour Party through the next General Election.

Some of these demands are breathtakingly audacious: abandonment of the public sector pay policy, reintroduction of secondary strike action and the end of private sector involvement in public services.

Yesterday’s meeting signalled a blatant return to the kind of old-fashioned stitch-up between union bosses and Labour politicians that dominated British politics in the Sixties and Seventies.

A deeply worrying case of double standards is at work here.

Suppose, for a moment, that the largest Tory donors – billionaire Michael Ashcroft, electronics boss Stanley Kalms, bookmaker Leonard Steinberg and others – had got together for a big Whitehall meeting to set future governm ent policy, with Downing Street officials present.