Round one in pensions battle

Yet the biggest surprise about yesterday’s events was not that hundreds of thousands of teachers and civil servants ultimately chose to follow the instructions of their union leaders and go out on strike, but how badly the Government is handling a situation that Ministers should have been anticipating before they even came to power.

Conservatives listening to the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, floundering on the Today programme as he comprehensively failed to put forward a convincing argument for pension reform in the face of a detailed critique of his policies must have been shaking their heads in horror.

He succeeded only in somehow making the firebrand leader of the Public and Commercial Services union, Mark Serwotka sound almost reasonable in his insistence that there is no justification for making public sector pensions more affordable.

The reality, of course, is that some reform is unavoidable, but it is important to remember too that there is only so much Britain’s long-suffering “squeezed middle” can take – a fact the Government does not seem willing to acknowledge.

Such arguments, of course, will not offer much consolation to the hundreds of thousands of parents across the country who were massively inconvenienced by the closure of their local schools for the day.

Their frustration will have been keenly felt, and unions must recognise strike action will rarely achieve anything when it so readily inconveniences the public.

Equally, parents struggling with childcare arrangements yesterday morning as thousands of schools closed will not have enjoyed listening to Mr Maude blindly insist that only a small number of workers were going on strike.

Once the dust has settled, discussions between both sides must resume. Negotiation as ever, will be the only way to solve this particular fight.