Right I can’t stop long, my fiction work in progress is coming along nicely and I want to keep the flow up. However I didn’t want to just leave you with all that crazy from last time, especially when there is so much crazy going on in the world at large, particularly on these fair isles of the United Kingdom, or as it shall hence forth be known the ‘Not Really All That United Kingdoms of It’s Not Fair and Anyway They Started It’. Honestly between Paul McMullan, the public sector strikes and the fact I’ve lost my parking at work, I think I might leave, jump ship before it’s too late, bugger off elsewhere, American perhaps, where at least the crazy doesn’t come as such a surprise.
I don’t even feel as thought it is worth covering McMullan, I mean really I think the man has utterly cracked up, the things he came out with at the Leveson Enquiry on Tuesday were totally bizarre. The only possible explanation is, that he knows he’s going down, so he has decided to, not only take down the entire, sinking ship down with him, but also to ensure that he’ll go down in infamy for being barmy if nothing else! It seems as though he thinks, that by sticking to the principles by which he has been operating, he retains some sort of dignity? Mr McMullan words fail me.
The public sector strikes this week are trickier, I’m fully aware of the difficulties of being a public sector worker, I am one, as is my other half. At the moment we all feel we are being squeezed in every direction imaginable. What other people don’t see is that’s it’s not just the fact that we haven’t had a pay rise and we are concerned about what is happening to our pensions that is affecting us. Management are squeezing more and more, out of less and less staff, many of us are already dealing with the consequences of a lack of investment in every area of our working lives, from IT infrastructure to the buildings we work in, to staff training, and much more between. We lack a lot and we make do. Non public sector workers may well look at us and say, we know nothing about the high end pressures of the private sector and they may be correct, but they probably don’t have to deal with working in cold buildings with broken heaters, having to beg for an extra paper clip or pencil, and being expected to produce high level work whilst being trusted about as much as you would a six years old with a flame thrower. Then there is IE6, yes, you read that correctly, some of us are still using IE6.
Having said all of that I’m not sure going on strike was the best plan in the world. It felt a bit like, we have a plan so we are going to gosh, darn stick to it whatever the circumstances. What the public sector and the unions need to be careful about is that wider public support in our favour has the potential to be one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal. However at the moment everyone is effected just as badly, everyone is feeling the pinch and everyone is quite likely to quickly get fed up with what they could see as the public sector whinging on a bit, whilst Europe is hanging on by a thread and might well fall in to a massive financial black hole, threatening to pull us in with it. There seemed to be general public support for Wednesday’s strikes, but lets not assume that will hold out if we aren’t careful. Unfortunately my experience on Wednesday, when I happened to have a long time planned day of annual leave, was that there seemed to be an awful lot of people having a jolly good day off work and not many folk on the picket lines. I mean come on if we are going to strike lets at least give sky news something to stand their reports by otherwise they get lonely and confused.
Me losing my parking is by the by, never-the-less the way things are going it could be the straw that breaks the camels back. Then again deep down I am terribly English so I might just pull the curtains, have a nice cup of tea and wait for all this to just blow over.
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