Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

This is utterly ridiculous and has rightly been rubbished by both Government and Opposition. The Unions are not the government and are not charged with governing. They thought they were in the seventies and brought the country to its knees, condemned Labour to 18 years in Oppostion and made the passing of laws to curb their wrecking activities a doddle and hugely popular with the electorate.

The BA strike has got them nowhere and has no public support whatever. But that is a dispute with an employer. This new cry for militancy is an attack upon the lives of the ordinary people in order to try and change government policy. It will fail and cost jobs if this silly rhetoric becomes union policy.

Nevertheless there is at the core a valid and important point. The Bankers, who have dominated the economy for over a decade, have totally skewed the economy and run it into the ground. The feel good extravagance of Canary Wharf and all the glass houses around it has not only been preserved from the stones raining upon the bulk of the rest of the population, but is now set to engage in another splurge of bonuses, like some society of gluttons who think it fun to hold themselves a banquet among the starving.

The posturing of government ministers is beginning to look spineless. We now need more than hot air on chat shows. The message to the Bankers should be short and very simple. Pay what you like, but if you do we will shut off your taxpayer funding. It took just a few hours for the Irish banks to fall into line when faced with that ultimatum. The sums are quite interesting. The amount of taxpayer funding that these over fed, over paid, over indulged and over the top people enjoy equates more or less to the cuts we are all having to bear.

That is the message Unite should proclaim. Strikes have got nothing to do with it.

We begin to get the picture. The authorities are only partly prepared for snow. They can cope if it is not too bad. When it gets for real, the complexity and inter-dependence of the transport infrastructure, which has cost countless £billions to set up, is not matched by investment in a means of keeping it running in bad weather. Let’s get Norman Foster to design a lovely terminal, but not waste money on snow blowers and deicers. The incompetence of BAA is matched only by the stupidity of the comments of its spokespeople and the ineptitude of the airlines who use its airport to respond to the humiliating farce now unfolding.

Several things about our modern society have come to light. Little things like too many people go out on the roads when they do not know how to drive in snow. Big things like a management system which relies on due process, procedures and manuals, screws up big time when trying to cope with the out of the ordinary. 

There is something even bigger. The modern State is too active busy bodying every detail of the way individuals conduct their lives, whilst utterly feckless in many responsibilities for which it actually exists. It has a duty to defend the realm, uphold the law and dispense fair justice. It is also required to maintain in working order public utilities such as water, power, transport and environmental infrastructures come hell or high water, rain or shine, drought or freeze.  Clearly it is no longer able to do all of this.

Time for a rethink. And not just about likely weather patterns.