I feel that in future years yesterday’s nationwide public sector strike in the UK will be looked back on as one of those political defining points when the clock starts clicking towards the end of a government.
Damp squid it was certainly not. The phrase used by Cameron was not only inaccurate , it was also insulting, as Ed Milliband rightly said, to demonise the dinner lady, cleaner or nurse who earn in a year what the chancellor George Osborne pays for his annual skiing trip. Not only was this the biggest national strike in thirty years, it was also one that resonated rather differently to the Winter of Discontent, as Britain’smiddle class finds itself increasingly squeezed, and the coalition begins to creek with the sound of Liberal Democrats showing increasing unease with an economic programme that is making more and more people poorer, and leaving a minority of very rich people, among them bankers, still very rich.
Much as the government tried to denigrate them, the public sector workers who protested yesterday showed extraordinary restraint- not an incident of violence reported as far as I know-while expressing their grievances with a genuine understanding of the issues involved. Much as ministers would have had us look at them as militant refuse nicks, this was not the image that came across on our TV screens.
By contrast there was little nobility in Gabby Bertin, the prime-minister’s well paid and job secure press secretary working for the day as a border guard- a cheap publicity stunt staged against the background of rabid cries from the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg –not exactly the personification of downtrodden man- that all striking border guards should be sacked en masse.
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