Daily Malice attacks all the wrong targets

The Daily Mail has done our movement a service by writing a comment piece which brings together every reactionary stereotype you could hope for in order to attack next Wednesday's strike (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2065930/Public-sector-strikes-Bullies-expose-ministerial-weakness.html?ito=feeds-newsxml).

First the "journalist" who wrote the comment regurgitates uncritically the Government's unsubstantiated claim about the likely cost to the economy of the forthcoming action.

Then they move on to the blame game. The real culprits are - of course - the trade union leaders who are "antediluvian monsters" - to be described as "antediluvian" by the house journal of English bigotry and xenophobia must be an accolade which will be welcomed as much by Tyrranosaurus Prentis as by the Serwotkasaurus.

There are, however, other villains.

Ed Miliband is in the frame because he has refused to condemn us. (Because we would dutifully surrender the pensions we have paid for all our working lives if a Labour Leader told us to?)

The BBC are also to blame apparently - because Ministers are running scared of being seen to be anti-union in that quarter. (This is odd as I seem to remember that the BBC have their own disputes with their own unions).

The Liberal Democrats too are responsible for our strike action ("the usual disagreements between the different halves of the Coalition pantomime horse" weakening the Government negotiators according to the Daily Malice).

But if Danny Alexander is partly to blame according to the Mail so is "Francis Maude — the wettest of wet Tories — (who, we are told, has) failed to heed the many warnings that, if Britain is not to be held to ransom by a small number of hard-left bullies, it must pass laws insisting on a minimum turnout for a strike ballot to be valid."

So, everyone is to blame apart from the Mail's preferred wing of the Tory Party (who have in fact initiated this dispute).

Also missing from the "analysis" offered by a paper which surely now struggles to justify being described as "middlebrow" is any sense that the coming strike arises from the reasonable and informed decisions of hundreds of thousands of workers, the great majority of whom are women - and many tens of thousands of whom are Mail readers.

Trade unionists should comment on this shoddy and ill-informed comment in a national newspaper.

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