Flight of Fancy

There have been a lot of dark mutterings about the projected British Airways strike and its affect on the death of the company. A look at the comments sections of MSM bloggers and it does not take long to find that the public are not enamoured of the national carrier.

The prognosis is not good: faced with 12 days of strikes at one of the busiest times of the year, they will lose very large sums of money and a lot of goodwill - that is if they had any goodwill before, which judging by the comments of passengers, they do not. There seems little chance of a bailout, since the politicians, apart from a few lefties, are not up for it. But there may be a sting in that tale.

But this post is not really about BA, it is about strikes, particularly strikes like this, which seem to me to be the last gasp of a dying breed; the formerly publicly owned corporations which still operate unrealistic working terms and conditions. Some of my readers may not remember the seventies and early eighties, at least in political terms. Though not in the forefront of political journalism, I did interview one powerful trades union leader who had crippled the country with weeks of strikes and he was actually very nice. It gave me some insight into they way they think, and to be honest, it was anachronistic then, so God knows what you call it now. Unions still think they are the Tolpuddle Martyrs. 

BA is an airline with a poor customer record, their staff are paid double what their competitors get, and the company has long enjoyed restrictive practices and monopolies that no other airlines get. And don't forget, they have done their best to destroy competition by any means they can. In the case of BA the baddies are on both sides of the dividing line - management and unions.

There is a sort of very nasty time-bomb ticking at the bottom of this dispute and that is that Charlie Whelan, the "Political Director" at Unite, is also very, very close to Gordon Brown, having been his chief spin doctor and exterminator, and who was copied into the famous Damien McBride ratfucking emails, and who only resigned from Number Ten after being caught leaking information that damaged Peter Mandelson. Unite is also keeping the Party afloat financially. Without Unite, Labour would be insolvent.

Whelan is probably as nasty as you can get in a political apparatchik, and it would not surprise me at all to see the Labour Government applying pressure on BA to settle the dispute or, in the nightmare scenario of BA going bust, the taxpayer picking up the bill for bailing out yet another useless British corporation.