There may be trouble ahead | 23 October 2008

Here’s another entry for the list of blots on Brown’s horizon: a series of strikes involving hundreds of thousands of civil servants.  The Public and Commercial Services union has scheduled them to begin on 10 November, and they’ll continue intermittently for at least three months after that date.  The root cause is anger over below-inflation pay increases (“Just look at how much money the banks are getting!” say the union officials), and the aim is to create “maximum disruption” to government services.  It’s exactly the kind of thing to draw a final line through the Brown Our Economic Saviour narrative, so Downing Street will be especially desperate to resolve things in the next two-and-a-half weeks.