Interesting story in the January 25th 2002 Times, front page and rightly so in my opinion. It begins:
“The Office for National Statistics announced yesterday that it would stop collating data on the number of days lost to industrial action, as further strikes loomed in the already hard-hit rail industry.”
Something big may now be happening in British politics. The New Labour dictat against big increases in government spending may now be expiring. Perhaps they think their reputation for financial rectitude is now fireproof. In reality, if they abandon financial rectitude, their political supremacy – their public support is “wide but shallow”, as many a commentator has noted – could vanish like the morning dew.
Strikes are caused by, among other things, financial uncertainty, and the biggest creator of such uncertainty is the State. By hinting that blank cheques may be available for keeping “public services” going (on account of them being essential, too important to be left to the private sector, etc. etc.) but by explicitly claiming (e.g. to railway managements) that, actually, State funding is strictly limited, each side is primed for a fight. Management insists it can pay only so much. The workers now think they smell a different atmosphere. The feeling in the country is now: time for something to be “done” about “public services”, and to many “done” sounds like “spent”.
It doesn’t have to mean this, which is what privatisation is all about. The government should now “re-privatise” the railways, probably on the basis of the old regional companies, with track and trains being combined again.
Will they be smart enough to do this? If they do, will the new Conservative leadership finally have the sense to split Labour by agreeing with the policy? Only if the answers are Yes and No can New Labour sail on unmolested.
Maybe the government will get a grip on things. But then I thought they’d get a grip on the Dome and they never did. The Conservative opposition under its new leader is showing distinct glimmerings of adequacy and the media are finally getting nasty with New Labour, hence the above story, among many others. (There’s also a huge ruckus now going on in our newspapers about just how bad the National Health Service is and whose fault it is.)
There’s lots more one could say about this. I will content myself with noting that the phrase “the honeymoon is finally over” is being much used in Britain nowadays.
