What if today's strikers really are like the miners?
We think this is a very odd comparison by Ken Capstick:
The media damns striking nurses and ambulance staff as the enemy, just as they did the miners
For of course the miners were the enemy. The enemies of Gaia that is. Those coal mines all did need to close. The very same wokes and luvvies who used to collect money for the striking miners now collect to oppose the opening of that Cumbrian mine today. On the simple grounds that Britain has no place for coal mines - and, obviously, no place for coal miners.
Leave all that stuff about Thatcher and Scargill and battles aside. The mines needed to close.
Which is why we think this is so odd:
When mineworkers took strike action in 1984 to save their industry from a government policy aimed at its total destruction, Margaret Thatcher was quick to refer to them and their families as the “enemy within”. As strikes take place across Britain, the government’s response echoes the past.
Whether it be rail workers, train drivers, Royal Mail workers, barristers, postal workers, refuse workers, London Underground workers, air transport workers or our wonderful NHS nurses, the government finds itself determined to force through cuts in wages.
Odd because the comparison being made is, well, which of these groups should now be considered the people we should deliberately put out of work? For that is the comparison with the miners.
It’s possible to muse on this, obviously. Automation might well mean we need fewer train drivers and London Underground workers. The fall in rail travel might mean we need fewer rail workers overall. While we recognise the necessity of lawyers it is conceptually difficult for us to support their fees. Apparently, given those same Gaia concerns as trapped the miners, we should be having many fewer air transport workers as air transport is to become verboeten.
Which is, as we say, most odd. For if we are to consider how the current strikes are indeed exactly like those of the miners then the obvious comparison is with which of these groups should we soon enough stop employing altogether?
Which isn’t what we think Mr, Capstick means but it is what he says.