What the papers say: ‘Power-mad’ unions, strike ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘misguided’ aid spending

Thousands of workers are walking out this week in a series of strikes affecting post offices, railways and airports – but who is to blame for this wave of industrial action? The answer is obvious, says the Daily Mail: ‘union dinosaurs’. The paper says the RMT president Sean Hoyle’s remarks that he wanted to bring down the Tory government finally revealed the ‘key aim’ of the strikes, and in doing so pushed away the ‘pretence that the vicious campaign of action which has crippled Southern rail has anything to do with safety’. It says that, as ever, the ‘first casualties’ in these latest strikes are the ‘long-suffering public’ and that while, in the past, Labour might have tried to at least ‘curb’ the activities of the unions, not any longer. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn – ‘an ideological relic of the 1970s’ – owes his position to the unions and will never ‘bite the hand that feeds him’.