Deja vu

Ever since returning to Britain in 1999, I have observed with mounting exasperation the clearest possible example of how people learn nothing from history. Every marxhorroid policy that once crippled the country has made a come-back, and now we have completed the return to the 1970s with the rump trade union movement making no secret of the fact that it owns the ruling Labour party.

Galling though this is for punters who do not suffer from political Alzheimer's, it is much worse for those like Norman Tebbit who have watched the painful reforms of the 1980s frivolously thrown away. Britain is well on its way to being once more the 'sick man of Europe'. 

Previously, the channeling of tax revenues to the unions had the political cover of maintaining employment in moribund heavy industry. Now, with trade unionism concentrated in the state sector, there is no political cover at all: the entire Labour movement is a closed system kept alive solely by the embezzlement of public funds.

If - and it's a mighty big if - Cameron & Co. have the the moral courage to take them on, the state sector unions are paper tigers. Strikes simply draw attention to how privileged they have become vis-a-vis the wealth producers who pay their salaries, and will affect mainly the wretchedly state-dependent, who vote Labour.

As for British Airways and the railways, I can think of no action more likely to produce a massive turn-out for the Conservatives than the course the Unite and RMT unions have embarked upon. They, also, have forgotten how loathed they became in the 1970s. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it: the first time is tragedy; the second time is farce.