Red E and waiting

Last year, Ed Miliband pulled out of a planned attendance at a Union-based event because of the adverse publicity it would no doubt generate. I think many of us now realise that his ambitions were already in place back then, despite his protestations that he hadn't even thought about standing for the Labour party leadership (a claim that was recently revealed to be, shall we say, misleading) so, with the likelihood of Gordon Brown leaving that position ere long, he changed his mind at that time.

Now, though, he is the leader, and very much indebted to the big Unions for putting him there, so this year he is going to be at the same event, an anti-cuts rally next month, reports The Mail. The proof of the pudding will be to see if he does go, and (if so) in what he does there; but we now have the "heads up" on this, so can watch to see what transpires.

Tweet of the day - 9 Feb 2011

From The Honourable Lady:

"I was once told by a Labour activist that a union was more important than a family and could raise a child better. That is some scary s***."

Remember that old line? "All of your children are belong to us."

The easiest prediction

Yes, I have for some time predicted that 2011 will be the real battleground between the Communists (and suchlike) and the Government. The student riots were just the precursor, and now that those pulling the strings and manipulating protests into violent conflicts can move to the next phase.

With the positioning of Len McCluskey as the Unite union's new General Secretary, preparations can now begin in earnest for next year's planned (and far worse than what we have seen to date) clashes between the political left and right - for that is what this is really all about, an ideological war using the gullible and the malleable as pawns against the elected Coalition (if not elected specifically on that basis) Government and, as always with the left, putting their own agenda above the interests of the nation.

Well, at least they're consistent!

McCluskey's predictable offerings, reported in The Guardian over the past weekend, show this very clearly. Even allying with the students is included, rather giving the game away to anyone sharp-minded enough to have foreseen that connection. We saw it coming, and knew all along!

Reading through the Guardian article I linked to above, including the bullet points in the latter half, demonstrates that this is indeed a political and not a genuine Union exercise: there are several give-aways in there. It demonstrates what those of us who were around  in the 80s well recall: public sector Union leaders don't have to be very bright, merely militant lefties (preferably Communists or equivalent)!

Anyway, we're in for at least one year of really nasty stuff going on, so gird your loins (or whatever one does these days) because it could in just a few weeks from now.

The enemy at the door

...or in the street, or the workplace. This is about the new boss of that huge public sector union, Unite.

Len McCluskey is (predictably enough) an old-style Communist Socialist whose attitude is very much reminiscent of the Scargills of the past and the Crows of today, and all points in between. It is hardly surprising as Unite is probably the biggest and most useful tool of the lefty puppet-masters who are trying to bring down our once-great nation, so they'd make sure it was always run by their people, such as Derek Simpson who was joint General Secretary until recently.

Jonathon Isaby does a good job of introducing us to McCluskey, largely based around the new Gen Sec's own words. Notice in particular the effectively open admission that his aim is to use Unite and anyone else who will work with them as a political tool, obviously along with its million-plus members plus as many others as they can get to tag along.

This is being termed an "alliance of resistance", and clearly shows the true nature and intent of public sector Unions - which experience has shown is rarely if ever genuinely interested in its members' needs, only going as far as they need to in order not to lose membership (and the income and muscle-through-numbers that their members actually represent). I am aware of a number of situations where Unions have deliberately given advice to members that lost them their jobs, but furthered the Union's political agenda - which was obviously all that interested the Union.

Therefore none of what Mr Isaby shows us is really a surprise, but we needed to know of it definitively in order to stay sharp and not be misled by Unite or any other Union, especially those for areas of the public sector. I have a strong feeling this will become important as rioting becomes far more commonplace during the next few years.

Now that we have a fair measure of the National Union of Students senior figures' involvement in the violent protests (Tory Bear has listed some of them) we can see where things are going. Those around in the late 70s and during the 80s will already have spotted it, and those who are too young would do well to study those times in advance of a repeat of that shameful period in our relatively recent history.

Own goal Mk 2

There are always (mainly public sector) Union bosses who get it wrong and shoot themselves and their "cause" in the foot. It happened back in 1978 to 1979 when the infamous Winter of Discontent was probably the largest factor in unseating Labour and assisting the resultant huge swing to Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives in May 1979.

Of course, we now know (and many of us suspected back then anyway) that they were using their 'heavy mob' tactics to coerce the then Labour government into giving in to their every demand. Indeed, they were problem trying to scare them with that very thought of losing office, both personally (for MPs and especially ministers) and governance of Britain.

History shows that it didn't work and that Jim Callaghan's Labour government was chucked out.

Today, the Unions are more cautious, not wishing to slay their (somewhat tarnished) golden egg. Therefore they have held back on their strikes and other disruptive behaviour until after the General Election. To some extent it worked, as it reduced the tendency of the voting public to switch to the Conservatives - hence our coalition government today.

However the Union bosses (who, though crafty, aren't generally blessed with a great deal of intelligence) still don't understand how things work in the reality outside of their Communist-inspired doctrines, and are making a similar mistake today.

Mark "Crash Bang" Wallace has it broadly sussed out, though I don't think he takes it far enough. He rightly says that Bob Crow's Union (that has the London Underground's staff out on strike again today) is helping the Conservatives - in particular Chancellor George Osborne - by discrediting strikes in general in the eyes of the public. It's yet another 'own goal' by the stupid Commies!

Back in the 'eighties there was a certain degree of sympathy and support for the miners, though that faded when some truths came out about Scargill and other matters, as well as for other reasons caused by striking in general around that time. I was in my early twenties at the time, and was almost taken in myself, at least for a short while. I was certainly wavering regarding which side I thought was right.

That isn't likely to happen this time; and the only support for the strikes, the students' riots demonstrations and all the other things that so closely mirror what happened back then, is coming from the 'usual suspects' of the Unions themselves, Labour politicians, the Mirror and Guardian types of rags, and left-leaning (i.e. Communist or similar) blogs including those by so-called Think Tanks.

The rest of us know better, and many of us have lived through it before. The same methods will no longer work, and they are fooling themselves if they believe otherwise. Stale, outdated negative methods will rightly be perceived for what they are, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with fairness or anything else with even the slightest of noble intentions.

It's all part of a destructive agenda, and this time we're wise to it!

Down the Tubes

I am so pleased that I no longer commute via the London Underground. I used to drive to Brixton and take the 'tube' from there, but no more!

Therefore I am unaffected by the strikes that are now afflicting that otherwise generally quite good facility. Okay, it has never been perfect, but it has tended to be good on the whole and certainly better than the equivalents in a number of other cities around the world.

Long ago, when I were but a lad, strikes were usually for genuine reasons (at least as far as I could tell), and then they became mainly political. This seems to have been something that really came into its own during the 1960s and (in some sectors) the 1970s, and has been almost entirely that way ever since, especially in the public sector where near-enough all strikes are in reality political.

Yes, there are pretences that they are being called for other reasons; but these all tend to follow the same pattern in any particular period, giving away the vital clue that the excuse given is just that - an excuse that has been found to work. Iain Dale has this well sussed; and it's fairly obvious anyway!

Of course, the tube strike fits in very neatly with Ken Livingstone's recently-launched bid to be re-elected as London's Mayor, which is why his tweets now come from "Ken4London", such as this anti-Boris tweet that clearly relates to the current wave of tube worker strikes. That message becomes even clearer in this tweet-linked "Livingstone Team" blog-post.

It's all of a piece, carefully orchestrated to facilitate the desired message. Of course, the Red Ken/Union connection is easy enough to see, as tweeted from Tory Press HQ, so we can take all of that with a suitably large pinch of salt:

"Thought for the day: Ken Livingstone's campaign offices are based in the HQ of tube striking union the TSSA "

The equally Communistic Greens are tweeting (and otherwise communicating) a similar view to Livingstone, one Jenny Jones calling Boris a "rubbish mayor" via a hashtag, even though he has been vastly better than his predecessor.

Perhaps the word of a regular user who also happens to be a Tory might usefully sum it all up, if one spots the underlying message in this Tweet from one Amy Jackson (no, I'd never heard of her either):

"I could rant about how selfish lazy idiotic ridiculous striking tube workers are, but what's the point? I'd only have to do it all again next week."

Well, I'll give the lady her due: that is the kind of sentiment that will ring most true with the millions of regular commuting users of the London Underground service. What can they do? It'll only keep on happening, week in and week out, because in reality it is an anti-Boris pro-Ken political programme intended to get the Unions' Trotskyite man back into City Hall as Mayor.

This is only the start of a two-year campaign, and it will get worse (and far more political, though I expect that only the more astute will spot this) from now on, no doubt culminating in a staged really severe disruption of public services prior to the London Olympics and a personal "intervention" by Red Ken that magically solves it all, making him the hero of the Olympics' salvation.

Remember: you read it here first...

BBC strike next week

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) strike that has been timed to coincide with the BBC coverage of the Conservative party conference next week, including when the Conservative party leader (and our Prime Minister) David Cameron is due to speak, has prompted a multi signature letter from 32 BBC journalists to the NUJ. The signatories include several big names such as Jeremy Paxman, Nick Robinson and Jon Sopel.

They say the intended timing of the strike, which affects only that one party conference and not the others, would be "counter-productive".

What this probably means is that they realise that they will be seen as politically biased (which the BBC obviously is, of course) and that could mean that the BBC's current freedom to act with partiality might end up being curtailed as a result. Although the minister (Jeremy Hunt) seems a bit wishy-washy on dealing with the Beeb, he could be encouraged to harden the government's attitude towards the national broadcaster.

Perhaps those journalists are also aware that they won't be able to put their partial slant of reporting the conference at the time, and other (less partial) channels will provide a more accurate and even-handed standard of coverage than BBC people would like. That would explain the term counter-productive!

The BBC's Director General has since echoed the letter's sentiments.

Update: the strike can now been called off (as at 1 October).

We've got our party back!

So said a Trade Union delegate at the Labour party conference, speaking to Lord Kinnock after Ed Miliband's speech as the new party leader.

Neil, who was never the brightest of kids on the block, thought this was a shared expression of good news. Of course, most of the rest of us would have realised that this was meant as the Unions getting back their political wing, the Labour party. If one thinks about it, it couldn't really have meant anything else, especially when one remembers that many of the biggest Unions pushed for Ed M to be the new leader.

The Unite union alone sent out over a million leaflets to its members, urging them to vote for Ed M. Okay, so only around a tenth of the recipients actually voted, which probably explains why the final result of the leadership contest was so close. Ed M did win, though, and yesterday he showed that he was still very much of the political left and at heart pro-Union, despite the rhetoric in his speech.

It is good to have been told so soon that the Unions are that certain they have their man in charge of "their" party. Now we know what Labour is going to stand for, and who it actually represents.