Labour’s union backing capitulation comes back to haunt them with strike chaos set to spread
Fickle friends
THERE is a rich irony in this Government being bewildered by the intransigence of union leaders.
Being shocked that militants don’t care if Birmingham’s council tax payers are subjected to Third World squalor during Unite’s six-week bin strike.
Labour will doubtless be similarly shaken if the hard-left dolt running the biggest teaching union organises a schools strike over pay too.
For years in opposition they acted as Westminster shop stewards for these outfits, piously backing every specious walkout, hoping to damage the Tories.
Now they’re the bosses, having to control the finances, reaping the whirlwind.
Worse, their capitulation to Aslef and others last year has led the brothers to believe this Government is a pushover.
Increasingly those unions are led by Marxist rabble-rousers, relishing a power they could never dream of securing from the voting public.
Their calibre was neatly illustrated yesterday by the bumbling feebleness of Unite executive Onay Kasab.
He had no defence to the notion that Birmingham, infamously bankrupt and in eye-popping debt, could safely now man every bin lorry with three employees, like other councils, instead of four.
He just didn’t like it.
Other “political choices” could be made, he wibbled. Funding should somehow be found . . . the feckless “magic money tree” economics of Corbynite numbskulls everywhere.
His overall boss at Unite, meanwhile, is happy to see strikes nationwide if other councils try to cut staff.
Labour empowered these clowns.
And here is the result:
A major city awash with rotting bin bags, alive with rats. And more chaos to come.
Brexit surrender
WHY, when the US Vice-President believes a “great” trade deal with Britain is close, would our Government drag us forever back under EU control?
This nightmare scenario would hand the European Court of Justice power over our food and agricultural imports despite us not being a member of it.
Our rules would be dictated by a foreign court, this time with no UK representation there: A staggering price which Labour are reportedly poised to pay for their idiotic “reset” with the EU.
Why do it at all, let alone if it jeopardises or weakens the US deal which JD Vance says has “a good chance” of being quickly agreed?
For all its turbulence, America is still the world’s biggest economy. A trade deal, maybe binning tariffs, is a huge prize.
It would be the fruit of Donald Trump’s love of Britain but also of Keir Starmer’s commendably calm handling of him before and during his tariff madness.
But it is also, crucially, because Brexit now allows us to strike such deals. Yet Labour Remainers aim to hand Brussels a stranglehold on our food imports.
It is shameful . . . and utterly bananas.