Tame the unions to get the services our nation deserves

NO LONGER just the provider of essential services, the public sector is fast turning into a vast engine of professional grievance.

- Leo McKinstry

Yesterday a tidal wave of indignation swept across the country, as half a million state employees staged the biggest co-ordinated walkout for a decade in support of hefty pay demands.

With no settlement of these disputes in sight, the industrial turmoil looks certain to worsen.

Further stoppages by nurses, ambulance crews, firefighters and junior doctors seem inevitable. This escalating militancy is exacting a heavy price, both in economic damage – yesterday’s strikes are estimated to have cost £200million – and in the disruption to the public.

Strikes are a crude weapon whose impact depends on maximising chaos, which is why the great progressive US President Franklin D Roosevelt regarded their deployment in the public sector as a form of blackmail.

“The obstruction of government operations until their demands are satisfied,” he wrote in 1937, was “unthinkable and intolerable.”

No such spirit of restraint applies to Britain’s trade unions today. Immersed in their quasi-Marxist fantasy as the champions of the oppressed proletariat, they revel in fomenting confrontation and denouncing Tory rule. Their spiritual home is the picket line. Their tool of business is the megaphone.