Now is the Winter of Our Discontent
Brits will be hammered by a wave of strikes every day until Christmas in a new ‘winter of discontent’, as Britain is plunged further into chaos. The Daily Mail has more.
Rail workers, including Eurostar staff, nurses, ambulance staff, teachers, security guards handling cash, cleaners, porters, driving examiners, rural payments officers and civil servants are planning action that will affect every day over advent.
Millions will have their lives disrupted by the coordinated walkouts, which are set to cripple essential public services in the run up to Christmas.
Of particular concern is a NHS Christmas walkout on December 20th, which some fear could bring the health service to a standstill.
Government estimates seen by the Times suggest the rail industry alone will lose up to £260 million because of the strikes.
Meanwhile, the hospitality industry has warned that industrial action will cost it £1.5 billion in lost sales as people avoid going out to pubs, bars and restaurants.
Hospitality U.K. chief Kate Nicholls tweeted today: “Hospitality businesses don’t have time to play with and losing the busiest Christmas trading week to rail strikes could be final for many.”
Steve Brine, chairman of the Commons health committee, said this winter’s planned action was potentially “more concerning” as new anti-strike laws have made it harder to legally call strikes.
This suggested union barons were more determined than ever to shut down Britain, he said.
Mr. Brine told Sky News: “We keep hearing that this is a repeat of the winter of discontent of the 1970s. In some ways it is not, but in some ways actually it is possibly more concerning because of course different industrial dispute legislation since the 1970s has made it harder to reach a strike mechanism trigger ballot.
“The fact that you have so much coordinated strike action now suggests that there is deep unhappiness with levels of pay and with some conditions within parts of the health service.” Meanwhile, simultaneous walk-outs by nurses, ambulance drivers and hospital staff could see hospitals fight to keep even basic services running.
Three unions – GMB, Unite and Unison – are discussing a co-ordinated strike date, says the Guardian, with talks between union bosses and ministers said to have taken place about how to “avoid loss of life”. The Royal College of Nursing has already confirmed members will strike on December 20th, and on December 15.
The Fire Brigades Union will ballot its members on December 5th for strike action over a pay dispute, while secondary schools in Aberdeen will close for pupils in some years next Thursday in years S1 to S4 due to walkouts.
Around 188 staff working for brewery Greene King are set to strike next month in a row over pay. Currently, no date has been set for a Tube strike this month but one may still happen.
Worth reading in full.
Meanwhile, there’s no sign the Government is getting any kind of grip on the unfolding chaos – other than the endless seeking of ‘compromises’ with their most implacable enemies.
Little wonder, then, that Labour saw its majority shoot up in the Chester by-election. Samantha Dixon, the new MP for the city, won 17,309 of the 28,541 votes cast, beating Liz Wardlaw, the Tory candidate, into a distant second with 6,335 votes. Labour increased its share of the vote from 49.6% to 61.2%, it’s best-ever performance in the city. According to Christopher Hope in the Telegraph, if such a swing was replicated at a General Election it would be enough for Sir Keir Starmer to win a majority.
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Stop Press: I told Mark Steyn on GB News last night that the only time the machinery of the state swings into action is when someone is accused of a ‘microagression’ or ‘hate speech’.
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Unfracking believable. Fire the bastards. Unions. Aways the public unions. Civil servants on strike? Fire most of them please and rehire privately.
The NHS on strike at Xmas?
Is this a bloody joke?
Save the NHS so they can tik tok dance, do nothing, jibby jabby for money and then go on strike?
As they add 9 more layers of diversity-climate thingy management and admin?
And yet the sheeple still profess their love and admiration.
And let’s not forget that most of the public sector were given 100% of their salary to do SFA during lockdown while £billions were hosed over their organisations to help them survive, NHS and railways are you listening? The public sector bone Idleness had a large part to play in stoking inflation and now they want to be protected from the effects of their own making?
We need to be clear about the root cause of this discontent, which is rampant inflation. The causes of this inflation are all self-inflicted: printing money to pay for the counter-productive response to Covid, trying to get to net zero without reason or means and ridiculous sanctions against Russia, having provoked them into attacking Ukraine. While we may feel that striking is counter-productive, to say the least, we should have some sympathy for people whose real incomes have been significantly reduced, many of whom are not highly paid to begin with.
The tragedy is that beating inflation is one of the very few things that we can look back on in recent history and celebrate as a victory. To throw that achievement away with zero benefit to society is criminal.
Inflation is the excuse, but the real reason is the vacuum of power. The unions know that the government does not have the capital to withstand strikes.
I agree, that’s definitely a factor. Again, a problem of the Government’s making. Also, if it hadn’t spunked 500bn quid up the wall there would be some room to stimulate the economy and we wouldn’t be in recession. Or depression, whatever we are going to call it.
Ten consecutive quarters of negative growth is apparently a depression. However I remain unconvinced that we have had much real growth since about 2008.
The very people screaming for lockdowns and moaning that they should have been longer and harder are now the very people going on strike because the economy is screwed. Totally in the belief that inflation has not been caused by paying the very same people to sit on their arses. The BBC have not mentioned once that lockdowns have created the problem. F**king clowns the lot of them.
The money printing has been going on since 1945 to move responsibility and dependence from the individual to the State.
Sympathy for the people who drove the very Corona politics causing the problem, who now want to keep making it worse by insisting that the mad moneyprinting must continue and who want my taxes to be spent on that while I won’t get any pay rise myself? That’s a good one. I’d favor the Peterloo solution.
I understand your anger and feel it myself. I don’t know why you and I didn’t fall for the propaganda and yet most of the people of this country did. I’m certainly not more intelligent and I have certainly fallen for propaganda and cons in the past. However, I think it is unfair to cast all of the ordinary working people who were conned as people driving the Corona politics. We should save our ire for those genuinely responsible.
Railway workers on £70K p.a. and working with restrictive practices going back to the 1950s are not my idea of “not highly paid to begin with”.
Nurses certainly deserve more, but given they’ve always been poorly paid you can hardly want to work as a nurse and then complain about your wages.
Green King, just down the street, private company as woke as any public one.
In Bury I’ve been surrounded by well-to-do virtue signalling maskerbaters, jab freaks and “it wasn’t real socialism” types for quite some time now.
What’s odd is that previously you could pin a blue rosette on a broomstick and it’d win around here, but everyone I work with sub 30 is turning woke as anything, maybe the red wave is coming after all, just needed to wait out the blue rinsers.
Greene King and Bury Saint Edmunds?
The brainwashing seems to be working anyway.
Inflation, strikes, high interest rates, tax increases, power cuts, crappy NHS, striking hospital workers, Socialist Government … makes me nostalgic for the 1970s.
It’s déjà-vu all over again.
The Union leaders have been bought, a point I have made frequently here on DS, and the unions are now being used to promote another diversionary tactic to the Scamdemic.
The reality, when the government caves in to the public sector wage demands, as they will, is that the funding will come from further massive public borrowing which of course will further impoverish the country.
Within 12-18 months the country will be declared bankrupt and thousands of public sector workers will lose their jobs. Most importantly they will be dependent on the state for everything. Say hello to your digital benefit payment and welcome CBDC..
Homes will be lost but fear not, the government will provide a hutch in the city – so long as you COMPLY. And of course cars won’t be needed in your digital city. Whoopee, ‘net zero’ here we come.
Union leaders are as much traitors, to their members and this country as are the politicians.
Always remember:
“It’s never about what they say it’s about.”
PTB planning for our future – Christmas 2020 stay home etc , Christmas 2021 – oh look out here’s Omicron better stay in again ! Christmas 2022 back to normal “US” yippee ! Not so fast f-ckers we will manipulate the system to cause Strikes everywhere so a third Christmas is tainted , stay anxious folks !
Absolutely Freddy.
Does that include the Workers of England Union?
I would hope not but surely you understand my intent.
Please can someone tell me, where were these skivers during the lockdowns, and specifically during the anti-lockdown (and related) protests where some people were getting duffed up by the police?
I blame the most profligate Chancellor in our history, whoever that was?…..”crickets “……..
Back in the days of Gordon Broon I coined the phrase “economically incontinent.”
By Fishy standards Broon simply had a touch of the runs.