Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

11:20 hboboxing: Wladimir Klitschko wins by unanimous decision. #KlitschkoHaye [via Twitter]


Saturday July 2, 2011 11:20 hboboxing
11:19 Eurobot: Both men stand in the ring, surrounded by their respective camps, anxiously waiting for the result. Here it comes...

What a shame Wladimir Klitschko wins by a unanimous decision

These middle-class militants will get a striking lack of sympathy

tweet0Print..Topics:Pensions & Retirement.Janet Daley, 20:35, Saturday 2 July 2011

White-collar workers protecting their unjustifiable pensions stir far less compassion than the working-class militants of old, says Janet Daley.

Call that a national strike? Unless you were unfortunate enough to have a child at one of the schools that was shut last Thursday and the statistical odds are that you were not you would scarcely have noticed it. At least not until you turned on the television news and saw the coverage which depicted it as a massive disruption of ordinary life.

The winter of 79 it was not. And for those of us who lived as sentient adults through the Golden Age of British industrial conflict, memories of the hardship we endured have never palled. My children raise their eyes heavenward when I regale them yet again with the stories of how we lived then how I changed their nappies by candlelight and taught them at home for weeks on end, while the Haringey school caretakers struck and the teachers refused to cross picket lines. In our day, you knew what you had to do when union leaders flexed their muscles: stock up on food, candles and coal, and resign yourself to victimhood. No sir, they dont make em like that any more.

But the contrast between then and now is more complex than it might seem. It is not simply that the current wave (or dribble) of strikes is being called on less persuasive grounds than the actions of the Seventies and early Eighties: most of the public seem unconvinced that public sector pensions should remain sacrosanct while their own savings and pensions schemes vanish before their eyes. It would seem from the strike ballot turnouts, let alone the participation in actual action, that even most union members are embarrassed by the demand to retain vastly better pensions than their neighbours who work in the private sector can expect.

And this brings us to the heart of what is really very different about todays industrial confrontations such as they are. The people who are being urged to strike now are largely white-collar, home-owning, middle-class staff who probably had some degree of choice about whether to join the public or private sector. Teaching, arguably, is almost entirely a state sector job, but there is still a degree of freedom in the choice of it as a career whereas, for example, there was no great variety of employment options for a working-class boy growing up in a mining village in South Yorkshire in the Seventies.

Todays militants are not at all like those proletarian descendants of the Industrial Revolution, whose families and communities were trapped in a tragic historical synchrony with national economic decline, and whose defeat was as heartbreaking as it was necessary. This is not class war. There is certainly no sense on the part of most working-class people that this is a struggle in which they have a stake: they are more likely to see civil servants and public sector employees as jammy b------s who have cushy jobs they are unlikely to lose however inadequately they perform.

If the working classes feel this has nothing to do with them, other white-collar professionals, whose employment prospects have become insecure to the point of systematic paranoia, are even less inclined to sympathise with public sector whingeing. If you are out there in the hard, ruthless commercial world, watching your colleagues drop beside you in the trenches while your own pension rights fade away, you are not going to pledge solidarity to your public service counterpart who insists he has a right to retire six years earlier than you (with your taxes to support him). Paradoxically, you are far less likely to be generous in your judgment of the current strikers than you were of the old Scargillite armies of the Seventies and Eighties precisely because todays militants are people like you.

For the longest time during that terrible era which began with the fall of the Heath government, then destroyed the credibility of the Labour Party, and culminated in the bitter ideological struggles of the Thatcher period, the unions however disruptive they became were not reviled. They may finally have exhausted the patience of the country during that infamous winter of 1979, when many of us who had been Labour supporters changed our political orientation for ever, but considering the privations, public opinion took ages to turn definitively against trade unionism. This was because there was a great reservoir of genuine compassion for those old communities of miners, shipbuilders and steelworkers that had once been the engines of British prosperity and industrial might, and which were now losing the only livelihoods they knew and any hope of economic security for their younger generations.

Some of this was sentimental bourgeois guilt, but a good deal of it was a perfectly rational, humane understanding that inevitable as it might be this was a fate that was being visited on people who had led tough lives doing dirty and dangerous jobs, and who were not in a position simply to move on to a different sort of existence. Middle-class sympathy for those who were caught in the collapse of the old industries was not just confined to the Left, and it was engendered precisely by the sense that the victims did not have ones own advantages: the education and the social confidence to tear up your loyalties, abandon your roots and find a new way to live.

But thats all over now. Class-based politics is finished in Britain and so is class-based trade union activism. The only people who think that it isnt dead are handing out placards with the words Socialist Worker at the top. The Labour Party discovered this, then forgot it, and now seems to be hovering somewhere between the two possibilities. The unions, which exist as a force only within the public sector, have had to reconstruct their political raison dre. It is not workers against employers any more: it is a life-or-death struggle to stop the contraction of state power because power over the state and its functions is their only sphere of influence. Market forces and the introduction of competition are a threat precisely because they dismantle the central government agencies that can be easily disabled by concerted union organisation.

The unions oppose what they call the fragmentation of services (through private providers or academy schools) because it is only through state monopolies that they can maintain their national wage bargaining powers and their ideological hold on the way those services are dispensed. So they must place themselves firmly on the side of authoritarian uniformity and against the diversity which offers freedom of choice to people like us and them. No wonder they find it hard to enlist enthusiastic support even from their own members.

Dreams,

Yow wouldn't like to start a Dream Watcher thread?

-=====

Is it true that Cameron calls Pickles his Gherkin?

Someone watches " Have i got news for you " It was only a joke .. Fred clutching at straw's again to score a point .........

Thought you said you were going to ignore Fred?

I felt sorry for the old fart

Aids,

Once again help is at hand for you.

True I did watch "HIGNFY", but I was asking whether the remark is true.

Nice to see another coalition (tory) government cock-up is on the way.

I hope you won't be on sleeping on the pavement.

But that with your "elderly care" bill coming around, I hope your "bets" do well.

By the way the PR boy (Cameron) is beginning to lose his hair and cool in the HP.
To me he looks more of a Spiv every day. Georgie is very quiet lately, letting his master take the flack.

Happy days.

Unfortunately, it looks like Cameron's government is fiddling while Rome burns.

Think I will go back to France.

PS, the association of Pickles and a Gherkin has put me off Gherkins. T'is a pity as I liked cornichons and homemade rillette for breakfast.

Fred constantly bitching about Cameron and the sensible party reminds me of a Pekenese dog trying to bite someone's ankles as they walk. Someone was asking what Fred was like the other day. Perhaps a Pekenese might be a good image or more likely a 'Shitsu'.

Haystacks,

Be careful, if we ever meet I might dump all over you.

Anyway, I thought you were a member of the BNP. The home of many an exiled tory blue.

I think I am even less lilely to support BNP than you.

Hays.

You supported the tories, who are obviously aimless and a lost cause.

I suppose you could chose UKIP.

But, I think some of the policies and practices of the tory coalition are attempts at splitting society by alienating different groups. It has the appearance to many as an attempt of divide and rule.

Not only does it seem dangerous to me, with the increasing likely-hood of decreasing "GDP", rising inflation, rising housing repossessions, probably future rise in unemployment. and decreasing hopes of previous expectancies. I think there may be a realignment of the groupings of the electorate.

Interesting.

Complete nonsense as usual.

And why does he put GDP in quote marks? Of all the things that annoy me about Fred, I think it's his aimless fracturing of written English that most irritates.

Wait and see.

Seems Cameron's gang and Cruella have got under the skin of the Police chief.

I suppose when you pick a fight, chose the world at least you don't have to worry about your friends.

Mind it is a shame that Cameron lost Andy Coulson, David Cameron's director of communications resigned.

Could have helped him with his friends Muddydock and Co.

Nobody knew anything it seems.

Is it birds of feather as the present cabinet?


I can see why the tories are in favour of a sell-out!

Again, it doesn't say much for Cameron's judgement.

(Quick open, forward and then reverse.)