Yesterday I commented Mark Wadsworth's post, Winter of Discontent:The daft buggers have only just repealed the law preventing prison officers striking in favour of a voluntary ban on strikes. Clearly nobody in New Labour is either old enough to remember the 60's and 70's or has read a history book.
This was more prescient than I thought because Labour has now started talking about 3 year pay deals for public sector workers, in effect a pay cut, with an expected union response which is covered with the usual rigour of Watt Tyler here:One cave-in we should particularly look out for is the RPI-linked deal. Already this morning we've heard the GMB calling for RPI plus o.5%, which at present would mean nearly 5%. On a public sector paybill in excess of £150bn pa.
BOM's more mature readers will recall RPI-plus was precisely the formula that hopeless Heath visited on Britain in 1973- just before the first OPEC oil price hike. And it really did turn a drama into a wage-price spiralling crisis.
Like Watt, I too remember the euphoria of getting a monthly pay rise, only to find that it didn't anywhere near compensate for a pint of beer increasing in price just about every night.
As George Santayana said:Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Lets just hope it isn't going to be 7 years before we get a "Thatcher" to untangle the mess again, it would be just too painful a second time round.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Labour need a history lesson
Posted by Simon Fawthrop at Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Labels: history, new labour
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1 comment:
Ta for link, apart from that, totally agreed.
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