I HAVE no idea what social background Rosa Prince comes from, or where she went to university. But as she is political correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, I’d hazard a guess that the answers to those questions will most likely be ‘posh’ and ‘starts with an O’ respectively.

Whatever the case, her grasp of the history of trade union struggle is clearly not all it might be. How else account for this opening paragraph?

Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, will also urge employees in both the public and private sectors to take part in civil disobedience during a wave of 1930s-style all-out general strikes.

Hmmmm. Unfortunately for Ms Prince, the decade in question – the years of the Great Depression and the national government – marked the inter-war low point for both union membership and levels of industrial action.

Let us assume that she is referring to the general strike of 1926. Only four years out, love. But even that was a one-off; ‘waves of general strikes’ have sadly never occurred in this country.

Anyway, I got the same press release that she did in my email inbox this morning, trailing a speech the Crowster will give to the RMT conference in Aberdeen today. The headline reads BOB CROW CALLS FOR GENERAL STRIKE ACTION, and good upbeat class war stuff it is, too.

“This ConDem administration has thrown down the biggest challenge to the Trade Union Movement since Margaret Thatcher took on the National Union of Mineworkers. I have no hesitation in saying that it will take general and co-ordinated strike action across the public and private sectors to stop their savage assault on jobs, living standards and public services …

“We have a right wing Tory Government propped up by a Liberal Party that has binned every commitment that it gave to voters in the run up to the election in order to grab power. That’s why we say this administration has no mandate for its cuts and that’s why we argue that bulldozing through their austerity measures amounts to fiscal fascism. It was zombie capitalism that dragged us into this mess and our people should not be made to pay to clear it up.

“The Trade Unions can only fight these attacks from the front foot. We have a Government of millionaire public school boys who are determined to rule by fear – fear of losing your job, fear of losing your home and fear of losing your benefits and the public services that you rely on.

“RMT says don’t fear them, fight them. Our Trade Union has a slogan, “never on our knees”, and from Aberdeen we want those words to ring out on the Millionaires Row of Clegg and Cameron. They started this fight with the working class and we are up for it.”

Regular readers will know that I am a stickler for the correct use of political terminology, and the formulation ‘fiscal fascism’ is clearly not a felicitous one. But sod it, he is addressing a union conference, not a postgrad seminar.

As an ex-Trot, I also recognize that the ‘general strike slogan’ – as we used to call it – represents a special thaumaturgical incantation that ‘objectively poses the question of state power’. Therefore it must never be invoked lightly, lest those using the magic words turn into a frog.

That has never stopped headbangers like the Workers’ Revolutionary Party employing it on a catch-all basis, distinguishing themselves with the copyright signature chant ‘TUC! Get off your knees! Call the general strike!’ even when protesting against local government nursery closures.

For its part, the Socialist Workers’ Party did not use the demand in the miners’ strike of 1984-85, when every other bugger did. But bizarrely, the call did form the centrepiece of the SWP’s agitation in the 1992 anti-pit closure campaign, when it was clearly out of place.

In the current climate, it is easy to see appeals for a general strike appeal making a comeback. I’m sure that Bob is being 100% serious in raising the question, and would walk it like he talks it if he got the chance, so let me stress that I explicitly exclude him from the criticism that follows.

But it has to be said that an abstract proclamation of the need for a general strike, in the knowledge that it ain’t going to happen, is an obvious way for any gobshite union official to position himself as a leftie.

Or perhaps I am being too dismissive. Opinions, readers?