New Labour has put an additional £52m on the table in talks over this year’s staggered pay settlement for NHS workers in England.

The move is generating a surprising number of favourable headlines, often implying that it represents something a boost for lowest-paid. But read the small print of what the health secretary is proposing.

Here’s how the Financial Times handles the story this morning:

Alan Johnson tried to buy industrial peace in the National Health Service in England on Thursday by giving low-paid staff and nurses more money.

Hey! Sounds great!

The health secretary is giving back a quarter of the cash the government saved by paying 1m nurses and other staff this year’s increase in two stages.

So he’s keeping the other three-quarters, then?

Still, the miserly gesture will probably be enough to avoid ballots on industrial action from the main nursing unions. Here’s the assessment of Unison lead negotiator Mike Jackson:

"The package on offer is a complex one, and will mean different things to different NHS staff depending on where they live.

"This is still a below-inflation deal for most, but it is the best offer we are likely to achieve through negotiations, and we will be balloting our members over whether they wish to accept it."

In short, Johnson’s ‘generosity’ amounts to a real terms pay cut. That’s not the way a Labour government seemingly so keen to throw tax breaks at venture capitalists should be treating some of the country’s hardest workers.

Something is badly wrong with Britain’s postal services. That much dawned on me when I moved to a new flat in inner London last year, and Royal Mail lost three packages destined for the address in just four months.

Any number of visits to the local sorting office, which I could only fit in on Saturday mornings thanks to the inconvenient opening hours, were to no avail. It was quite clear that the staff – both the guys at the counter and the supervisory people supposedly put on the case – couldn’t care less about my missing packages.

I now have any mail order goods I buy sent directly to my workplace. It’s the only way I can be sure of receiving them.

Meanwhile, I assume that other people are getting letters addressed to me in roughly similar proportion to the number of times that I get letters addressed to other people. That's at least once or twice a week.

As a socialist, I naturally want to argue that Royal Mail should remain in the public sector. Performance that sucks as badly as that doesn’t make it any easier. But I'm going to do so anyway.

It's little wonder that a workforce putting in long hours for lousy pay and conditions - while watching chief executive Adam Crozier, chairman and Labour Party member Allan Leighton and the rest of the incompetent top brass pocket City salaries - is utterly demoralised and apathetic.

Of course they don’t take the notion of ‘customer service’ seriously. On their money, few of us would.

The latest Royal Mail ‘pay offer’ might as well be designed to make them even more unhappy. Not only does it amount to a real terms pay-cut, but look at some of the strings attached.

For instance, management are seeking to introduce ‘annualised hours’, which will see staff working less in the summer but more at busy periods such as Christmas.

The number of hours worked each day would be increased or cut according the work available, with only seven days notice given for changes. Try planning a social life or family commitments around a timetable like that.

The bosses also want to cut weekend working and stop night shifts, two moves that could together cost some employees up to £200 a week. ‘Door to doors’ - mass junk mailings, basically - are to be increased from three to five per week, with no extra payment or possibly even no payments at all.

Additionally, there are plans to reduce redundancy payouts and pension provisions, raise the retirement age to 65 after 2010, and exclude new employees from the final salary scheme.

To top it all, up to 40,000 jobs are at risk, even as the way is paved for widespread casualisation on the back of cheap agency labour.

Hence today’s strike action. Many will deride it as a throwback to the 1970s. In these days of email and txt msgng, for many of us it won’t make much odds one way or the other. All that ever comes through my letterbox these days are bills, offers of yet more credit cards, and endless sodding pizza flyers.

On the other hand, it will clearly have an effect on business. Royal Mail is circulating this memo to companies in my part of London:

This action will severely limit our ability to provide any services for the coming period. You should expect severe disruption to all postal services during the strikes and for a significant period afterwards.

Please accept my sincere apologies for the disruption this will cause you.

So if any CWU members get to read this, congratulations on taking a stand. And good luck with the campaign. Now ... can any of you find out what happened to those bloody parcels last year, please?

So this isn't really a guest post, obviously. Nevertheless, allow me to quote a few extracts from a 1986 book called 'Political Strikes: the State and Trade Unionism in Britain'.

The author - a certain P. Hain, research officer for the Union of Communication Workers - is now secretary of work and pensions - erm, at least for the time being. So it can only be a matter of time before he acts on the proposals, surely?

The trade union movement has experienced great changes since the early 1960s, and the new right's political attack has undoubtedly reduced its power to advance, as well as its ability to strike.

Striking for demands like these could well win greater support than striking over wages.

Hain goes on to stress 'the key necessity for linking extra-parliamentary action by trade unionists to parliamentary action which is responsive to such struggles'.

He rounds off the book by arguing that 'Britain's unions can try to overcome their historical limitations by constructively politicising their activities ... and, most important, campaigning for industrial democracy as a step forward towards real workers' control'

By the way, I should point out - if only for the benefit of younger readers - that back in the day, this sort of prespective was unexceptional, even within the Labour Party. Many on the far left would have attacked it as wussy soft left drivel that fostered illusions in the working class and failed to comprehend the lessons of Chile. Those were different times.

Oh Peter, Peter. We were never exactly on the same political wavelength, even when we were both involved with Tribune in the early 1990s. But at that time I did at least accord you a certain degree of genuine respect as a radical reforming politician. I don't think I like what time and high office have done to you.

A HANDFUL of people found themselves on the dole after being outed when the British National Party membership list appeared online; now it emerges that the old practice of blacklisting leftwing trade unionists hasn’t gone away. So how much of a secret can anybody reasonably expect their ideological leanings to remain from their boss?

There are parallels between the two cases, which raise obvious issues, not least at the level of employment rights. Most importantly of all, should support for an extremist political organisation - or a mainstream one, come to that - disbar a man or a woman from any given employment?

If so, does a youthful stint in the Communist Party or the Monday Club, long since genuinely disavowed, disqualify a job applicant two or three decades later?

Full disclosure here. Although I am currently a member of the Labour Party, it is a matter of record that I have been in several revolutionary socialist groupings and still subscribe to broadly analytical Marxist views.

Ironically, I’d guess leanings like mine are more of a problem in the public sector than the private sector these days, at least in my line of work. Sure, plenty of Trotskyists stereotypically go into teaching, housing and social work.

But trade unions and Labour councils famously tend to avoid taking them on for press officer or union journal editor type roles, presumably because of their embarrassing tendency to uphold basic labour movement principles. That, and the fact that they are bloody troublemakers, given half the chance.

Fortunately for me, I have worked for a succession of magazine and newspaper editors of the opinion that what I get up to in my own time is my own look out, so long as I do the job they pay me to do. My current workplace is unionised, but not strongly so, meaning that the worst I can get up to on that score is a spot of zealous health and safety repping.

I took an early decision to be explicit about my political outlook and to write in leftwing publications (largely) under my own name. I suspect this may have cost me potentially lucrative freelance commissions, and possibly even jobs I could otherwise reasonably have hoped to get. But on the whole, I feel more secure knowing that everything is out in the open than I would if I was trying to keep things hushed up.

Obviously, other people - including such pseudonymous regulars in the Dave’s Part comments box such as ‘Southpawpunch’ and ‘Stroppybird’ - have taken the opposite decision. That’s fine; everybody’s circumstances are different. But what if a blacklisting group got hold of their identities?

Thanks to an investigation in the Guardian, the Information Commissioner has announced its intention to prosecute a company under the Data Protection Act for allegedly maintaining a blacklist of construction workers, which building employers paid handsomely to access.

It seems that the owner of Consulting Association is a former employee of the Economic League, which operated from 1919 until officially being wound up in 1993, keeping records on around 20,000 people.

Most of them weren't hardcore Leninist cadre. In many cases, they were simply people who may have, say, attended a few leftie meetings or handed out leaflets on a picket line. Still others were victims of mistaken identity.

Some, of course, were bona fide Marxists and anarchists of various stripes, or just militant trade unionists. But so what? None of those stances are currently unacceptable in legal terms, at least the last time I checked.

But however names end up on the files, the end result is the same. Working class people are potentially denied employment opportunities and thus the chance to provide for themselves and their families.

Common sense does apply here. Some employment is straightforwardly politically sensitive by nature. The Green Party should be under no compulsion to hire a UKIP activist, even as a bog cleaner. No Labour Party member could reasonably expect a job at Lib Dem headquarters, or vice versa.

It also seems fair enough to me that BNPers are not allowed to take up roles in which even-handed treatment of people of all ethnic backgrounds is a prerequisite, and in the days when alignment to Moscow was in issue, some branches of the state understandably tried to keep out CPGBers, albeit not always successfully.

But in general, if a political party is legal, past or present membership of it should not be permissible grounds for employment discrimination. What is more, logical consistency dictates that if we postulate such a position for adherents of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, it must apply to those of the National Front as well. A British Berufsverbot would be a wholly retrograde step.

GENERAL Motors chief executive Charles Erwin Wilson apparently never did utter the precise words ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for America’, although he did say something like it at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in 1953.

And what is good for General Motors these days is de facto nationalisation. The Obama administration is expected to have a 72.5% holding in the Detroit-based car giant when it re-emerges from bankruptcy.

It is surely ironic that a Labour government in Britain is prepared to let the UK operations of GM go hand rather than contemplate a similar step. Sadly, the call is not being made either by Vauxhall employees themselves or their union leaders, let alone the Labour left.

Nor does industrial action seem in prospect. Strikes against job losses frequently appear pointless, and can be hard to organise, given the inevitable demoralisation that sets in on receipt of a redundancy notice. But where there is nothing to lose, the argument for occupations is probably easier to win.

In the meanwhile, why not press the political case that Vauxhall and other companies that would otherwise go bust be taken into social ownership under workers’ control? The demonstration effect of an assertive response would probably prove considerable.

Sure, a serious response to what is happening right now will inevitably involve countering market logic, and with almost no exceptions, unions seem to have long ago lost the imagination necessary to do that.

But the penalty for not reviving the tradition of fighting back rather than taking things lying down should be obvious to everyone in the labour movement.

WHEN Peter Mandelson starts quoting Margaret Thatcher soundbites at trade unionists, the implicit tactlessness is almost certainly perfectly deliberate. While New Labour plans to sell a 30% stake in Royal Mail to the private sector might fail anyway – simply because nobody is willing to stump up enough cash – the business secretary insists the government ‘are not for turning’ on the issue.

Those shocking words – exactly the ones to emerge from the mouth of the former prime minister in one of her best-known speeches in the 1980s – constitute either a Freudian slip indicative of Mandy’s subliminal attraction to Thatcherism, or were purposely chosen to highlight arrogant contempt for the organised working class.

No surprise, then, that the Communication Workers Union conference, which meets in Bournemouth next week, will hear strong calls for disaffiliation from Labour. A motion from Coventry branch argues that the CWU ‘cannot continue to support a political party whose government continues to ignore the interests of our members’. Read the full text of this and other similar resolutions here.

Disaffiliation was defeated in 2007, but the union has already promised to ballot the membership on the withdrawal of funds from the Labour Party if the Royal Mail sell-off goes ahead.

Ironically, former CWU general secretary Alan Johnson sits in the cabinet as secretary of state for health, and may even find himself a stop-gap prime minister if Brown can be defenestrated prior to Labour’s crushing defeat at the next general election.

The CWU is not one of the unions I have cause to follow for work these days, so I won’t make any predictions about which way the vote will go. But while I absolutely understand, and even sympathise with, the arguments set to be advanced by backers of the motion, I nevertheless hope it fails.

The reality is that disaffiliation – contrary to hopes [scroll down] that the CWU will sign up to some radical labour movement regroupment – is rather more likely to result in further trade union depoliticisation.

Unions and the Labour Party have parted company before, of course. Labour effectively kicked out transport union RMT in 2004, when some of its Scottish branches decided to donate funds to the Scottish Socialist Party. The FBU, which represents firefighters, quit that same year in disgust at the government’s stance during its 2002 strike over pay and conditions. Proposals to rejoin have since been defeated on a number of occasions.

The RMT has not pulled out of the political arena, and is the driving force behind the No2EU slate in next Thursday’s eurovote. But this project has, to put it politely, failed to take off, and leader Bob Crow is rightly reticent to hitch the union’s wagon to any of the existing far left formations.

Meanwhile, the FBU – now headed by my old Bethnal Green Labour Party Young Socialists comrade Matt Wrack – has little by way of an organised political presence, despite signing up to a number of leftist pressure groups.

CWU leader Billy Hayes is seen as part of the trade union awkward squad, and plainly has some sort of political relationship with the Socialist Workers’ Party, making him one of the few general secretaries ever known to contribute articles to SWP-backed bulletins ostensibly aimed at the rank and file.

But Hayes seems to be staking his strategy on the hope that the union can somehow sweet-talk Gordon Brown out of pushing ahead with privatisation, purely by polite request and logical reasoning. While I do not know him personally, he does not strike me as another Crow or Wrack.

What follows is a judgement call, rather than an issue of principle. It is obviously barking to maintain that unions should be wedded to Labour at all times and in all circumstances. But a more sensible immediate approach for the CWU would be to join forces with other Labour-affiliated unions to throw the weight they still collectively possess behind a agenda that takes trade union concerns on board, including the right to put forward political resolutions to Labour Party conference.

With election defeat likely to dictate an entirely new balance of internal forces inside Labour within the next year or two, such a task is likely to prove easier than it might appear right now. There is little to lose by staying in and gearing up for a fight.

ISN’T it compulsory to mention French air traffic controllers when writing a leader on industrial relations for a rightwing newspaper? I only ask after perusing the Daily Telegraph’s opinions on the RMT-led 48-hour tube strike that is currently causing comparatively minor disruption to public transport in London.

Otherwise, the editorial doesn’t miss a trick, setting some kind of benchmark for cramming multiple clichés into a single sentence. There’s the obligatory reference to a well-known 1959 British comedy film, an odious comparison between taking industrial action and demanding money for the release of a captured person, and even the suggestion that strikers do not qualify as fully evolved human beings:

The RMT union, run as a personal fiefdom by Bob Crow, a Left-wing agitator straight out of the I'm All Right Jack school of Neanderthal militancy, routinely holds the capital and its environs to ransom.

In the very next line, we get a surefire pointer to the social class of the writer, for whom the highlight of the summer is clearly not two weeks of boozing and shagging in Benidorm:

Their strikes come around every summer, as regularly as Wimbledon or Ascot.

Not to mention Henley Royal Regatta, the Chelsea Flower Show, opera at Glyndebourne and the odd game or two of polo, of course. But at least we can see where the chap or chapess is coming from.

Almost as bad is Stephen ‘fuck you, Desmond’ Pollard, who fulminates in The Times:

Mr Crow - Arthur Scargill without the brains or charm - lives in a different world, one where employers sit on piles of cash, keeping it from workers through sheer bloody-mindedness, and taxpayers wait with eager anticipation to hand over ever larger sums to the public sector.

Hang on a mo’. Doesn’t Crow live in Woodford, actually? I mean, I wouldn’t fancy Essex myself, but I can’t help feeling it is somewhat over the top to equate that county with Mars or Jupiter.

And if we are going to start talking taxpayer cash, I’d like to hear what full settlement of the RMT demands would cost, expressed as a fraction of a percentage point of the amount of taxpayer cash that investment bankers have trousered over the last two years. Are tubeworkers somehow intrinsically less deserving than Fred the Shred?

And that's what Mr Crow is banking on. He believes that you and I should have to dig deeper into our pockets to increase the pay of RMT members such as station supervisors earning £39,000, Tube drivers on starting salaries of £40,000 and station assistants starting on £29,000. There's nothing low about the salary base of Mr Crow's members.

Let’s go over that slowly. Bastard fat cat RMT members get £40K top whack, for a job that includes nighttime, weekend and public holiday. A 5% rise on that – which is what the RMT is demanding – wouldn’t even pay for a good Centre Court seat for the final match at Wimbledon. You know, the event that comes round every summer, just like a tube strike.

Finally, here’s another time-honoured British industrial relations ritual. Ask a bosses’ organisation to conjure up a figure that reflects ‘the damage to the economy’ caused by any given strike. Or, if you can’t get hold of anybody, make up a figure yourself and attribute it to ‘business leaders’. Nobody will ever find out, especially not the newsdesk:

Business leaders have warned that the strike could cost the economy up to £100m in lost productivity. The walkout affected 1.5 million commuters yesterday, with an estimated one in 10 staying at home.

Really? According to London Underground, the Northern Line is running a near normal service, while a number of other lines are operating on a shuttle basis. The bosses are presumably exaggerating slightly for propaganda purposes. But they are not obviously lying. What’s more, the bus companies have responded by running hundreds of extra services.

From what I can gather from my workmates, everyone that wanted to get in did get in. Even for those that live in the sticks, their journey this morning was barely more of a pain in the arse than it is normally.

Put it to the average punter that the strike has made their commute difficult, time-consuming, slow, expensive, dirty and generally hellish, and the most likely response will be: 'and?'

If one in ten are staying at home, that’s not necessarily any big deal. Many will be able to work perfectly well from a laptop in the spare bedroom, and will be frankly glad to skip the commute.

Me? I’ll be walking home tonight. But the exercise will do me good. Best of luck, RMT.

PERHAPS the tactic known by the immortal franglais neologism of ‘le bossnapping’ has something to do with it. But fear of the legal consequences alone would surely be enough to stop Total giving the entire workforce of a plant in its home country the boot, with no notice whatsoever at that. So why is it being allowed to get away with it this side of the Channel?

Yet there is no legal obstacle whatsoever to the French oil major sacking at least 700 UK employees at Lindsey Oil Refinery, and then telling them that they have until Monday to reapply for their posts.

The difference is that where continental countries guarantee some form of employment rights, Britain celebrates the hire and fire culture to the point where Labour dishes out government roles to the likes of Sir Alan Sugar, in the misguided belief that this somehow sprinkles the Brown administration with some sorely needed showbiz stardust.

A Downing Street spokesman has already clarified the official line on the Lindsey dispute. ‘Unofficial strike action is never the right response to industrial relations problems,’ we are told.

Taken literally, I suppose those words could be taken as simple advocacy of official strike action instead, perhaps on the grounds that it is likely to be more effective in the long run.

But somehow, I suspect what the guy really wanted to say is that no kind of strike action is ever the right response to industrial relations problems, and that walkouts should not be contemplated in any circumstances whatsoever. Meanwhile, we must await Number Ten’s response to the sensible, constructive, emollient and patently completely grown-up approach embraced by the employers.

Total’s nakedly nasty move makes its intention absolutely clear. Shop stewards, troublemakers, lippy bastards and/or anyone with minimal self-respect will not be required back. What we are seeing is the return of hardline, back-to-the-eighties, management’s right to manage old skool union busting, pure and simple.

Yet British workers remain constrained by a statute book that since the Thatcher era has been stacked against them so comprehensively that Tony Blair admits its provisions are the most restrictive in the western world. That was a boast and not a condemnation, of course.

So far, there are reports of solidarity with LOR at oil refineries and power stations across the country. Given the etiolated state of working class organisation in Britain, I will admit that until now I would have said that an instantaneous response on such a scale would not have been possible.

Just this once, I am happy to be in the wrong. It would be premature to argue that victory is guaranteed in advance, but the prospect of a sustained outbreak of blue collar wildcats for the first time in decades is one that every socialist should find exciting. Heck, it might just be worth putting the real business of beating each other up over theoretical disputes on hold for the duration.

TRY skipping your credit card payments for 18 months and a CCJ will be only the start of your worries. How ironic, then, that American Express has unilaterally decided to stop matching pension contributions for its 6,000 British employees for the next year and a half. That won’t do nicely.

Elsewhere, BT is offering staff a year off in return for a 75% pay cut, with the remaining quarter of their salary as an up-front payment. Also available is a one-time-only £1,000 payment if people agree to go part-time. The moves come after 15,000 job losses and a pay freeze unveiled in March.

Accountancy major KPMG recently called on its 11,500 employees either to go onto a four-day week, or to take up 12 weeks’ holiday on 30% of pay. Management was surprised when 85% of the workforce – back office staff as well as six-figure salaried superstar beancounters, presumably – agreed with the idea. That was far higher than the two-thirds level for which the bosses were hoping.

Unionised British Airways pilots have voted to accept a 2.6% salary cut in return for shares in the company, with over 90% in favour. True, a mass meeting of 2,000 BA cabin crew rejected a job and pay cuts package from the company, which includes reduced holidays and travel allowances.

But trade union Unite has tabled an alternative plan for a two-year wage freeze and £130m-worth of savings instead, which scarcely sounds preferable.

Funny, isn’t it? Many firms won’t budge beyond below-inflation pay increases in years in which they rake in record profits, yet are fast enough to share out the pain as soon as recession strikes.

The large margins seen in support of some of the proposals above underlines that many workers accept the logic at work. Probably a minority positively welcome the schemes, which could provide them with time to undertake other projects. Others will be resentful, but in the absence of a labour movement with the confidence to fight back, will not regard themselves as having any choice.

Nevertheless, it’s probably worth flagging up this article from the Daily Telegraph, of all papers. It is quite clear that under UK law, an employer cannot unilaterally impose a pay cut, or unilaterally change working hours specified in an employment contract. Companies cannot make a job conditional on accepting a reduced salary. Even if a majority vote of a workforce accepts a cut, individuals do not have to do so.

Individual resort to employment lawyers is no substitute for collective action. But in the current climate, it might well be better than nothing.

I AM just about old enough to remember the last time the British working class had the self-confidence to occupy workplaces threatened with closure. The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of 1971 was a major news story at the time, and may have done as much as anything to reverse Ted Heath’s tentative stab at Selsdon Man premature Thatcherism.

It was only later - when I became a Trot – that I learned the history of a tactic that, by definition, challenges the rights of the employing class to ownership and control of the means of production.

Factory occupations formed the highpoint of Italy’s biennio rosso of 1919 and 1920, and took France to the brink of revolution in 1936. So-called sit-down strikes featured strongly in the United Auto Workers playbook of the period.

In the 1960s and 1970s, occupations were again common in France and Italy, and even happened regularly in comparatively backward countries, like this one. As a pamphlet from the period - republished here - spells out, many of the companies involved were among the biggest names in manufacturing, in the days long ago when Britain actually had an industrial base.

They included Vauxhall, Cammell Laird, Massey Ferguson, Hawker-Siddeley, Plessey, Fisher-Bendix, British Leyland, Imperial Typewriters, Linpac Plastics and Coles Cranes.

And then? And then successive Tory governments launched a premeditated offensive that largely smashed trade unionism as a meaningful force in a series of key sectors. For many socialists, advocating a fight back in the face of mass job losses became little more than a matter of going through the motions.

Yes, that was what the headlines said in the papers we sold and the leaflets we handed out, and what we argued for at union meetings. But privately we knew that stoppages very rarely came to fruition. Strike-days fell to their lowest levels since the 1890s.

A whole new generation filled the offices, call centres and remaining factories, brought up in the 1980s with little or no understanding of what trade unionism had represented to their mums and dads.

Thatcher’s children, we called them. In private, we didn’t think they were up to much, politically speaking anyway. And wasn’t the music they listened to bloody awful?

Eventually it got to the point where only the fruitcake ultraleftist fringe seriously advanced slogans such as ‘organise! occupy! fight for the right to work’. Even the SWP had become too sensible for that sort of stuff.

So I’ll be the first to admit to being astonished by what has happened in the last few months. We have had two major waves of wildcat strikes – now illegal, let us not forget – topped up with a number of factory occupations.

First up was the Prisme packaging factory in Dundee, which was not even a unionised workplace. Soon afterwards, some 200 workers at the Visteon car parts plant in Belfast and 80 of their colleagues in Enfield took over their workshops.

The latest workforce to organise, occupy, fight for the right to work are the employees of Vestas, a non-unionised wind turbine plant at the Isle of Wight. How excellent that transport union RMT have come out unequivocally in support of the dispute; other unions, please note.

None of this is to argue that Britain is standing on the brink of a sustained upturn in industrial militancy, although I expect the rightwing press will be producing a spate of dross articles to that effect in the weeks to come.

But it does mean that, all of a sudden, socialist arguments cut with the grain in a way they haven’t for the best part of two decades. For the left, that has to be good news.

THE 48-hour postal strike planned for later this week represents ‘a suicidal move’ for the Communication Workers Union, according to Lord Mandelson. A leader writer on the Financial Times compares the CWU to Turkeys voting not just for Christmas but Thanksgiving as well.

But if any fatalities ensue, they will not be self-inflicted. As a leaked PowerPoint presentation documents, Royal Mail management has already drawn up plans to derecognise the union, and is ready to make good on the threat by recruiting 30,000 strikebreakers.

Meanwhile, TNT – Britain’s largest private mail operator – is also gearing up to handle a slice of the work. Trials have already taken place in several UK cities, according to one leading trade press title.

What we are witnessing, for the first time since the miners’ struggle of 1984-85, is a meticulously plotted and perfectly deliberate scheme to smash a strong public sector trade union, with full connivance from the state, in order to push through privatisation in whole or in part.

Presumably aware of the parallel, CWU leader Billy Hayes last week even compared his position to that of Arthur Scargill a quarter of a century ago. By implication, we now have a Labour prime minister cast in the role of Margaret Thatcher.

As regular readers will be aware, I am not an apologist for the shoddy service all too frequently on offer from the Royal Mail and the Post Office. There is clearly a need for substantial investment in new sorting equipment, for instance.

Working arrangements are in as much need of modernisation as the technology. But given the abysmal take home pay of most postal workers, there is plenty of scope for buying out Spanish practices.

However, these aims can best be achieved by persuasion, not by bludgeoning the workforce into submission. Already some 50,000 jobs have gone since 2002. The imposition of a pay freeze, attempts to make some overtime unpaid and compulsory, and proposal to replace almost all full-time jobs with part-time positions can only be designed as a deliberate provocation.

Royal Mail boss Adam Crozier – reputedly the highest paid person in the entire public sector – should cut the macho management crap, stop viewing himself as Ian MacGregor reincarnate, and negotiate the necessary change.

I’m told by journalists who are following these events more closely than I am that there is a fair chance the strike will not happen on Thursday and Friday, and that both sides will soon been round the ACAS table.

But what if the walkout goes ahead? A postal stoppage this close to Christmas will inevitably be unpopular with the public. The CWU must make it plain that if Mandy and Crozier get their way, the postal service will be slower, more expensive and even less reliable than it is now. The union is justified in calling the strike, and it deserves the support of the entire left.

YOU just can’t get the staff these days. Even the Daily Mail is aghast at the quality of the scabs Adam Crozier and Co are taking on to break this week’s Royal Mail strike. Looks like some of those lovely mail order Chrissie pressies are about to go walkies:

Royal Mail is hiring thousands of 'strike-breakers' who have not had their references checked or been vetted for criminal records.

In some areas, people are being interviewed three at a time.

LIBBIE Escolme Schmidt – speaking as the author of a book documenting the too, too glamorous time she spent as a 1960s trolley dolly, you understand – thinks that striking British Airways cabin crew are ‘a disgrace to their profession’, and gets space in Britain’s biggest-circulation quality newspaper to tell them as much.

One line alone will give you a flavour of the piece: ‘For most of my career I felt guilty taking my wage, as it was such a fabulous experience.’ It presumably does not occur, either to Ms Escolme Schmidt or to the Daily Telegraph, that life probably just ain’t like that for the men and women working long-haul flights to huge numbers of mass market passengers.

Their basic wage is only £18,7oo a year, and even if it is bumped up to something like twice as much as a result of allowances, many of them will be finding it difficult to make ends meet. Given that BA chief executive Willie Walsh is on £735,000, few will feel that their wedge is overly generous.

Elsewhere, the Torygraph slips into union-bashing on auto-pilot, seriously trying to maintain that the strike is really down to boosting devious leftie Len McCluskey’s chances of becoming general secretary of Unite next year.

The logic here is that the British Airline Stewards and Stewardesses Association is a hitherto unsuspected bastion of class consciousness, with 92% of those voting backing McCluskey sufficiently strongly to lose a big chunk of a month’s salary, just to give him an edge in the contest. The story is more BS than BA.

Not to be outdone, the Daily Mail regales us with the tale of ‘the BA comrade in California: £50k a year union activist who lives in LA and hasn’t flown for a year’.

Only some way into the story does the reader discover that the reason BASSA activist Lizanne Malone hasn’t flown for a year is that she is recovering from osteoporosis. It’s called ‘sick leave’, guys. Get used to it.

The truth is, this dispute has got nothing to do with a sudden lurch into on the part of the lower orders, the machinations of the ex-T&G Broad Left, or the unfortunate necessity of allowing employees time off to recover from ill health, even if they are union reps. It has been caused by Walsh’s determination to slash jobs, cut pay, rip up working agreements, and ultimately smash the union.

If BA is indeed experiencing economic problems, the blame lies with management’s disastrously mishandled business strategy. Walsh should step down now. And take the rest of the board with him.

IMAGINE a scale that runs from one to ten and measures every independent polity in the world in terms of niceness and nastiness.

At one we have Sweden and Norway, because they are permanently cuddly and welfare statey and social democratic, even when the centre-right gets in.

Singapore occupies the half way point with a score of five, because it is authoritarian while desperately trying to pretend to be a semi-democracy. Trade unionism isn’t exactly encouraged, for instance. But trade union activists are not routinely executed, either.

At ten I have placed Saudi Arabia and Burma, both utterly execrable totalitarian regimes with manifold sins that need no reiteration here.

This scale is not designed as a yardstick of democracy as such, but rather an indefinable property that might be described as a ‘bastardness quotient’. You must know what I mean.

The game is this: commenters are invited to place Cuba, Iran, Israel, Britain and the US at points of their choosing along this continuum, giving reasons for doing so.

When evaluating Cuba, for instance, you have to decide whether the combination of a one-party state, a ban on independent unions, free universal healthcare and the eradication of illiteracy makes the place better or worse than Lee Hsien Loong’s Asian city-state.

Ditto Iran, which some leftwing blogs apparently consider ‘a mature democracy’, despite its repression of peaceful demonstrations by opposition supporters. Does it rank above or below five in your book?

Arab citizens of Israel have all the rights associated with liberal democracies. Yet at the same time, Tel Aviv’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians has rightly attracted the condemnation of liberals and socialists everywhere. What should we conclude?

How about the US and the UK? How far do the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq make them international bastards of the first water? Do you cut them any slack for adherence to broadly free elections and human rights at home?

Over to you. I’ll join the discussion in the comments box.

IT MUST take a considerable degree of doublethink simultaneously to oppose the US-led occupation of Iraq and support the Chinese occupation of Tibet. That doesn’t stop some on the left giving it a go, of course.

The idea of a right to self-determination is common coinage for liberals and socialists alike. If Iraq deserves that privilege – and I think that it does – then Tibet surely merits it as well.

After all, it was Karl Marx himself who suggested that ‘a nation that oppresses another will never itself be free’, and the force of that observation is not diminished simply because the oppressor nation makes some sort of claim to adhere to socialism.

The business of the left is to oppose all occupations, and if we are to be consistent, that stance should not be conditional on who is doing the occupying.

I have been thinking about this question as a result of reading programme here in Hong Kong, which over the last couple of weeks had taken in many aspects of China’s politics. A number of books have left me yet clearer than I was before that the country can be characterised as imperialist, at least in the pre-Leninist usage of the term.

The Tibetans are clearly distinct in religious, linguistic and ethnic terms, and Tibet must be classified as a nation on any standard theoretical basis. Any argument that it has been ‘part of China’ for centuries is patently historical nonsense. In short, China shouldn’t be there.

Beijing – and therefore its fellow travellers – make much of the notion that Tibet was for centuries nominally a tributary state. But then so was the Vatican, as far as Han supremacists are concerned. The designation is effectively meaningless.

Nor can too much store be set by the 1950 ‘liberation’ of Tibet by Maoist armed forces. This was simply a de facto handover of an independent country to foreign rule by Quisling elements in the ruling theocracy over the heads of the population.

China has since then systematically exploited Tibet’s natural resources, and has resettled Han Chinese colonists there to the point where Tibetans are at risk of becoming a minority in their own homeland.

Yet the literature – even the most anti-communist of it – concedes that Chinese rule has meant social advance, most notably the eradication of serfdom and extensive land reform.

An argument can be constructed that the occupation has been historically progressive, in the sense that Marx used the term to apply to British imperialism in India. While Marx was absolutely clear that this contention should not be adduced to justify continuing British presence, the impact is worthy of dispassionate note.

Yes, I know. The catchphrase ‘but it was historically progressive, comrade’ long formed a favourite construct in the lexicon of apologists for Stalinism. Seemingly there was nothing that the USSR did that could not somehow be excused with reference to the notion. Heaven help those who got in the way.

Which brings me back to Iraq. I don’t resile from the idea that the invasion was wrong, and still want to see withdrawal in short order.

But is it entirely heretical to suggest that in the long-run, the overthrow of a wicked dictatorship and the re-emergence of a legal political left and an organised working class will prove to have been, well, historically progressive, comrade?