Bill Carmichael: Union bosses just don't get it

A succession of bug-eyed, red-faced, beer- bellied union bosses have leapt to the podium to denounce the coalition Government's plans to rein in public spending variously as "savage", "brutal",

and "vindictive".

Given the amount of expense account food and booze the brothers trough their way through during their annual jamboree, there's a danger one of these over-excited boys will keel over with a coronary. Calm down dears, it's only the TUC conference.

TUC chief Brendan Barber, supposedly one of a dwindling number of "moderates" in the union movement, warned that any attempt to make savings in the bloated public sector would make Britain a "dark, brutish and more frightening place".

The more militant Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers' Union accused ministers, who are desperately struggling to deal with the crippling 155bn deficit inherited from Labour, of launching "all out class warfare".

The RMT's leader, the even more militant Bob Crow, went even further by demanding "civil disorder on the streets" including sit-down protests on motorways by benefit claimants. I couldn't help thinking that if claimants are fit enough to fight in the streets and protest on the motorway, perhaps they shouldn't find it too difficult to get a job?

Sometimes it is hard to escape the conclusion that these guys are living on another planet. Take, for example, Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services' Union.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics this week demonstrated just how unsustainable the gap has become between the non-productive public sector and the wealth-creating private sector.

Public employees now enjoy pay and pension packages worth on average 136 a week more than those working in private businesses. But Serwotka demanded that the public sector should be protected from the recession that has cost tens of thousands of private sector jobs.

There should not, he declared, be a single penny cut or a single job lost. This is madness, as was lucidly demonstrated by another speaker at the TUC – Merseyside chief fire officer Tony McGuirk.

McGuirk explained how he had reduced his fire service workforce by 40 per cent without shutting a single fire station or withdrawing a single fire engine. The key, he said, was getting rid of the large proportion of "bone idle" employees that infest the public sector. Far from damaging front-line services, his reforms had improved them.

The TUC would like you to believe that even the most modest cuts will have a devastating impact on front-line services. They portray their campaign against sound finance and debt reduction as a crusade for the vulnerable and disadvantaged.

This is nonsense. What we see here is an immensely favoured and advantaged elite that is determined to hold on to its privileges and sinecures at the expense of the working poor. If the public allows them to get away with it, they will ruin the country.

Wham and slam

IS the world a safer place now that George Michael is safely locked up in Pentonville prison? Sympathy for the former Wham! star is in short supply. Some people like to see famous people brought down low.

Certainly he was given plenty of warnings by the courts about his out of control addiction, and you wouldn't want to be crossing the road when he came driving along in his 80,000 Range Rover after smoking a few splifs.

What he did was dangerous and stupid. But the fact remains he didn't hurt anyone, admittedly more through luck than judgment, and I can't help feeling the eight-week prison sentence is unduly harsh.

Our judges bend over backwards to keep even violent repeat offenders out of jail. If the idea was to shock Michael into sorting himself out, wouldn't a long community sentence work equally as well?