Poor motherless son

In the red corner we have the Union movement, an old bruiser whose glory days are decades in the past, needing a big win to stave off extinction. The unions come from the cage fighting school of boxing. No rules and the last man standing wins.

In the blue corner we have the Conservative government, using the dire economic situation to green light all the swingeing cuts to public services they've ever dreamt of. The government prefers to play by the Queensbury rules of boxing. As far as the authorities were concerned Arthur Scargill rather ruined the sport when he just didn't have the decency to know when to stay down, and changed the law to cramp the style of any future Scargill wannabes.

The days of general strikes and mass pickets may be legally curtailed, but the unions are beginning to realise they can pick strike dates that, just by chance, coincide with action by their sister organisations in other industries. Socialist politics are typically republican in outlook, it being difficult to reconcile the theory that all folks are born equal against the inherited privileges of the monarchy. What better choice then, than to target the upcoming royal wedding with multi-industry strikes?

The unions are banking on overwhelming public support against the cuts, but what they seem blind to is the fondness that the average working classes have towards the royals, especially the poor motherless son of the late sainted Lady Diana. They may well find the public are rather looking forward to their street parties, and will take a dim view of any union action that threatens to spoil the fairy tale wedding.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A confusing smorgasbord of antipathies

I was born in the 70s. That gender could have a separate definition to biological sex wasn't a question that had hit the general public consciousness,  so I grew up in a gender normative environment at a time when biological sex and gender were considered to be the same and immutable. Sixty years after the suffragettes started the feminist movement, my mother's generation pushed the cause forward.  My mother taught me to ignore society's sexist prejudices. I learnt from her to not limit my ambitions or accept being treated as lesser. Fast forward another two generations and sexism is still ubiquitous, if less blatant, and it still blighting women's lives around the world. The place we find ourselves in now, where we are challenging the notion that biological sex and gender are the same or that is gender is immutable, has been a long time in arriving. If it mirrors the slow progress made by the feminist movement, there could be many decades of struggle ahead, and stil
Read more

Why, oh why, am I puffed up like a balloon after my operation?

I'm swollen around the chest area as I'd expect after the double mastectomy - there are some sloshy seromas building up which I've been told not to worry about - the seromas should self-resolve, and if not they can be drained with a needle. I was particularly aware, as I woke up this morning, that my face and neck feel quite puffy. My eyes feel all crowded in by swollen eye lids. I feel like I've gained 10 pounds around my middle too. This swelling has been developing since my operation three days ago. I thought it was my imagination until I looked in the mirror and saw a big round moon face looking back at me. Why, oh why, am I puffed up like a balloon after my operation? Thank goodness for the internet. While it can on occasion lead us down dark alleyways, often it can take us straight into the light... It seems evolution provided a way for injured animals to lay up for a few days to recover from traumatic injuries. With an injury hormones are released which
Read more

Brimming with possibility

The day after my last post I fell ill with flu, which delayed my operation by two weeks. I'm now two days post-surgery, back home, and recovering. I had breast cancer operations in 2001 and again in 2008. Those were traumatic experiences, my post surgery recovery was tainted with feelings of loss, and fear for the future. Each of those operations were just the heralds of more debilitating treatment - the long hard slog of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Following on from that were the yearly scans and tests to check for new cancers and secondaries, a regular cycle of building tension as each appointment came due, plunged back into the medical world for the tests, then the gruelling wait for results, hoping to hear those precious words "all the tests came back clear" and feel the giddy relief once more. This has framed the last 18 years of my life. I allowed it to box me in. I focused on getting through each day. I made no long term plans. I did not peer in
Read more