Brown Starts To Get Real, Bob Crow Doesn't

Well, Gordon Brown has finally had to do a U-turn and admit that cuts need to be made in his speech at the TUC, sadly though not all the union leaders are reading from the same hymn sheet, Bob Crow said:

"Both Labour and the Tories have committed themselves to cuts and privatisation and the trade unions have to take the lead in mobilising resistance and we should start preparing right now, here in Liverpool."

So get ready for some strikes then. Hopefully before the General Election, given that Labour have done more to build a state-based apparatus it seems fitting they get on receiving end of it going rabid.

Brown still showed that he doesn't seem to understand how disliked he is, claiming that "He said he believed the choices his government had taken were the choices of the British people. " Yeah. That's why you're riding so high in the opinion polls you great lumbering imbecile.

He's also still trying to play the 'nasty Tory cuts' angle, although that's not going to cut much ice with the unions who seem to think the people who pay for them - the private sector - should suffer alone. Claims of preserving vital frontline jobs don't hold much water, not against the backdrop of a government whose made so many notjobs and empowered quangos.

I know neither party are going to make the needed cuts - the DfID needs simple excising like the lump it is, around half the quangos can go, charity funding needs to be no more, and much of the NHS middle management can be safely flung into a skip without affecting frontline services one iota - simply because they're going to be advised by mandarins with their own little empires to preserve.

IT failures like ContactPoint and the ID Card farrago will be good to see gone, and we don't need a replacement for Trident just yet. But overall, we need a much smaller public sector, the unions whose existence are pretty much beholden to the public sector - private sector union membership is something like 15% - so their leaders can afford their champagne socialist lifestyles, will not take this lying down.

We may yet have a winter of discontent, and if the strikes happen with the Tories in power, god help us - I really can't see Cameron having the spine to challenge them. The unions are in the way of this nations recovery, out of purely selfish reasoning, and if they aren't prepared to help then they need to be smashed.