Bernard Ingham: History repeats itself as union bosses prepare to ignore reality over pensions

For the next 23 years, I was at the heart of the efforts by both Labour and Conservative governments to secure a better balance between the rights of trade unionists and the public.

Barbara Castle’s ill-fated – and ill-named – “In Place of Strife” White Paper was followed by Robert Carr’s equally doomed Industrial Relations Act. Then came Margaret Thatcher’s series of union measures and the miners’ strike, which finally subdued the union barons and their henchmen who glory in the class war.

In between, the old Department of Employment clocked up nearly 26,000 strikes in the 1970s alone, costing a total of 128,000,000 working days, damaging the economy and disrupting too many people’s lives.

Fuelled by beer and sandwiches, we got little sleep in that department as the power game was played out overnight in smoke-filled rooms.

In the end, government prevailed on behalf of the people. The unions should have recognised that this nation has a distinguished record for taming kings, barons and gradgrind employers – and so, today, should our over-paid top footballers, company executives, quangocrats and bankers who have much to answer for.

I painfully recall our industrial history of the last 51 years because of what will be going on – or not going on – tomorrow. Some 750,000 public servants, including teachers, are due to take to the streets in defence of their pensions.

Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT transport union, ludicrously portrays it as a fight against the greatest assault on civil liberties since the miners’ strike in 1984-85.

The plain fact is that those who go on strike tomorrow will be denying, like Ed Balls, that the government of their unions’ preference had any part in creating the conditions, through over-spending and over-borrowing – partly to buy public sector votes – that require urgent economies.

They will also be rejecting any notion that those in the public sector should contribute to those savings or that their privileged position, compared with the majority of workers in the private sector, should be eroded.

Not for them, if a strike or series of stoppages can avoid it, a penny more towards their index-linked pensions or a longer working life to go with rising life expectancy.

No, the public sector, with all its failings and abuse of the public purse, must be preserved in aspic, regardless of whether it is financially sustainable.

It isn’t on. It becomes a monstrous arrogance when I am reliably informed that a woman visiting a hospital last week found her friend’s soiled nightie in a stinking case behind her bed three days after her admission. The people no longer believe public servants are motivated by service to the public.

As a Civil Service pensioner, I recognise that not every retired government employee will come to enjoy my relative level of comfort.

There is a very wide pay range – and all the wider for the soaring rewards at the exploitative top end over recent years – but the coalition is not trying to grind the faces of the poor into the dust.

Through the recommendations of former Labour Minister, Lord Hutton of Furness, it seeks to ensure that whatever pensions are paid are affordable.

You would not imagine any of this from the union rhetoric, which clearly has Labour leader Ed Miliband very worried indeed.

If brute force and ignorance can preserve their position then to hell with the taxpayer – and, for tomorrow, parents forced to take a day off to look after their children, travellers and all the other millions variously inconvenienced.

Worse still, we do not know how many public servants voted for all this. I shall be astounded if half of each participating union’s membership even bothered. The coalition claims that of those taking the trouble the best it got was a third of the membership for a strike.

This is the abuse of power that the coalition should end. Stop taxpayer funding of public sector union officials to the tune of £18.5m a year if you must. But keep your eye on the ball.

Union memberships should not be the playthings of class warmongers. At the very least, a 50-plus per cent turn out of total membership should be required for a legal strike

That is what tomorrow should in all fairness bring to battered Britain.