A dishonest Government and our undervalued teachers

From: Peter Asquith-Cowen, First Lane, Anlaby, near Beverley.

THE strike by teachers and public sector workers was the largest for many years. They have been pushed to the very brink. The public needs to know that teachers’ pensions do not cost the taxpayer anything.

Teachers pay their own contributions over a lifetime of service in the classroom. It is how these contributions are invested that determines the size of their pension. It is devious, dishonest and prevaricating behaviour by Government to tinker with teachers’ pensions, won many years ago by hard-fought negotiations around a table.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

To say their pensions are “unaffordable” is a blatant lie.

It is unworthy of Graham Stuart MP (Beverley and Holderness) to criticise teachers, calling their strike action “unprofessional”.

Teachers are professional, responsible, individuals and strike action is the last resort. Beverley Grammar School headteacher Mr Chris Goodwin was absolutely correct to point out that “public servants are being castigated, denigrated and undervalued”.

No teacher wants to disrupt the education of their charges. However, abroad (in Europe and elsewhere) teachers are paid a proper salary commensurate with other professions.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

If this happened here and the Government stopped tinkering and interferring with education, there would be no reason to strike.

From: G Ellison, Hawthorn Avenue, Dronfield.

GOOD luck to the public sector workers in their strike on pensions, job losses and pay. I’m waiting for William Hague to defend them as “fine upstanding gentlemen/women” as he did with the Tory fuel protesters who cost industry £1bn losses in their fuel blockades under New Labour.

Come to think of it, why aren’t our firemen on strike, when Old and New Labour had to call in the army, or our police who marched in their thousands to Parliament complaining about New Labour? Are they waiting for another New Labour government to moan?

We all know that the Tories have never done anything for the workers and never will.

From: A Davies, Heathfield Court, Grimsby, NE Lincs.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

AS I read the spate of anti-union letters in your correspondence columns, I am reminded of a conversation over 60 years ago.

I had gone to work in 1945, clutching my School Cert in my hand. I shared a table in the canteen with a couple of die-hard Tories, both in their mid-50s. There was an occasion on which there was some industrial dispute or other – it would have been 1947-ish – and one of them offered an immediate solution. What this country needs, he said, is a good dose of unemployment. That will put the unions in their place.

I printed out to him that these same menfolk had endured four years in the trenches in the First World War, had spent far too long in the dole queue in the 20s and 30s, and had then fought in the Second World War (or had worked back-breakingly long hours producing weapons of war).

I asked him why he wished to see them, once again, in the dole queue. He told me that I was only a lad, that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and continued his diatribe. Now, some 60-odd years, and some scores of social, industrial and economic history later, I think I do know, but I cannot understand the typical middle-class Tory attitude towards the working class. At times “hostility” is insufficient, “hatred” is nearer the mark. Why?

From: Tom Howley, Wetherby.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

SIR Bernard Ingham, influenced by his old boss Margaret Thatcher, hates trade unions, trade unionists and public service workers (“History repeats itself”, Yorkshire Post, June 30).

He opined that “people no longer believe that public servants are motivated by service to people”. I read this insulting and disgraceful comment immediately after a visit to a friend in a Leeds care home.

The staff were polite, courteous and patient and obviously cared for their patients. Still fuming from Sir Bernard’s unfair and cruel diatribe, I also studied an article written by a “Guardianista” – the Daily Mail and Bernard Ingham’s favourite name for a liberal policy-led newspaper. The subject was “Anne”, a 42-year-old qualified deputy manager in a residential care home. This dedicated servant of the old and the sick is awarded a salary of £18,000 a year for the responsibilities she faces each day.

Sir Bernard would be well-advised to follow in the footsteps of his father, a trades union official who devoted his time to improving the wages and conditions of trodden-down working class folk, instead of using his journalistic talent to insult and denigrate the people with he grew up with, the people his father deeply cared for.

Related topics: