Anxious exam students. Workers who can’t WFH. Why doesn’t Labour care about strike’s REAL victims?

AS BRITAIN braces for a week of crippling strikes, Labour politicians are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of yet more discomfort for the Government.

Both Keir Starmer and Angela rayner have refused to condemn the action. Asked at this week’s PMQs to state his position, Starmer instead made some absurd accusation about the Prime Minister wanting them to go ahead so he ‘ could feed off the division’.

I’m sorry, Sir Keir, but the only people ‘feeding off the division’ is you and your party, who would rather butter the parsnips of your union paymasters than risk sticking your necks out in defence of the people you claim to represent — the ordinary man and woman in the street.

The hypocrisy is staggering. Because, make no mistake, those who will suffer most from this paralysing action are not the wealthy and well-heeled middle classes you so openly despise, but the people you allegedly care about the most: the poor, the zero-hour contract workers, the disadvantaged children, those working two jobs to pay the rent.

They are the ones who will be skewered by these strikes. They are the ones who will be left standing for hours in the broiling hot sunshine (or the pouring rain, the British weather being such a joyful lottery).

And if the Labour Party had one ounce of integrity, it would acknowledge this, and use its clout with the unions to help bring about a resolution. But it won’t. Because it would sooner set Britain on fire than collaborate with the Government for the greater good of its people.

Take my lovely cleaning lady (yes, I employ a cleaning lady: so sue me). She was practically in tears this week at the prospect of next week’s rail and Tube strikes. She has various jobs all over London and relies on public transport to travel between them. Under the proposed action, the only way she will be able to work is by Uber. And of course Uber trebles its prices whenever demand shoots up, as it does when there’s no other method of transport.

She faces getting up at 5am to get to her first job at 8am, working late to avoid the rush — and spending most of what she earns on cabs. How is that fair? And how can a party that claims to support the working man and woman possibly endorse such a state of affairs?

Her son, a builder, is in the same boat. And there are millions in the same position, ordinary people who can’t, like civil servants and MPs, just have a nice day off ‘working’ from home, aka pottering about in the garden occasionally answering the odd email.

As for Starmer, he’s got a nice airconditioned official car to get around town in, so it’s no skin off his nose.

And that’s another thing. Cars. Pollution. Congestion. Aren’t these all things the Left are vehemently opposed to? Don’t they want us all travelling together in each other’s juices like good little socialist cattle?

Isn’t that why London’s socialist mayor, Sadiq Khan, has spent the past few years assiduously turning the capital into a no- car zone by criss- crossing it with vast cycle lanes, ‘ low traffic zones’ and bus lanes the size of runways?

True, there is always the twowheeled option. But what if you are a child, old or infirm, or you have mobility problems?

Once again, aren’t these the sorts of people Labour is always professing to care about the most? So how does turning London into a city where only young single people or drug dealers on e-scooters can move about freely work, I wonder?

But I digress. Back to the strikes. As a mother, the thing that incenses me the most is this: it’s exam season. Children are sweating over books, working for tests that, in many cases, will determine their future.

Surely Labour, being the selfappointed party of ‘ youth’, should take their needs into consideration. Because if teachers can’t travel to work, how are they going to invigilate the exams? And if children can’t get to school on time, or arrive flustered and stressed out, they’ll inevitably not do their best.

WHEN life is not easy for an awful lot of people, when families are struggling with rising costs, when children are working hard to recover from two lost years of proper education as a result of Covid, when so many are stressed to their limits, it beggars belief that any responsible political party or politician should fail to condemn industrial action that is only guaranteed to add to that pressure.

When it comes to the transport unions, we’ve long ago ceased to expect any sort of moral compass or sense of social responsibility: they operate on a simple principle of blackmail.

But it is the job of all politicians, from all backgrounds, to champion the needs of ordinary voters. Boris Johnson may have his failings, but at least he’s got a spine.