Forget the unions, what about the lives ruined by their strikes?
Until October 1997, BBC1 used to end each day’s broadcasts with the national anthem. the tradition was axed, a few months after tony Blair came to power.
Such a patriotic gesture seems unthinkable now. Anyone who proposed it would be derided by Auntie’s outraged lefties as a swivel-eyed little Englander.
if the BBC has an anthem today, it is the Red Flag, the marching song of the international socialists and, of course, the labour party. never has that been made more clear than by the two-part documentary
Strike: Inside The Unions (BBC2).
A disclaimer declared that government departments and companies hit by the current wave of strikes, affecting everything from transport to healthcare, had declined to comment. this was a pallid excuse for bias, in a programme that amounted to a celebration of the union organisers who are trying to hold the country to ransom.
Cameras followed RMt chief Mick lynch and his lackeys as though they were latter- day incarnations of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, leading a peasants’ revolution — instead of the bunch of smug, well-off, boastful, callous, self-righteous, swaggering bullies that they really are.
lynch’s deputy, cloth- capped Eddie Dempsey, harked back fondly to the 1960s when union thugs could go beating up strikebreakers. ‘Bit more tasty back then,’ he chortled.
We met Kath, a nurse who says she hasn’t had a wage rise in ten years — a claim that was not challenged. She has to sell her old clothes online to make ends meet, she says. She gave her interview, huddled in an anorak in her house and clutching a cup of tea as though she was in imminent danger of freezing to death. Patient care was ‘paramount’, said Kath, though she didn’t explain who was going to look after her patients while she was on strike.
if the BBC cared about balance, director Jo Prichard could have found the other side of the story, by talking to some of those patients.
Strikes by the nurses, and the doctors too, have condemned countless thousands to longer delays and broken appointments for vital medical care. though they are ignored by the BBC, their lives and their stories matter. Aggressive pickets and political activists are now prevented from unleashing violence on those who oppose them, however much the likes of Dempsey are itching for a punch-up.
But for nurses to walk off hospital wards and gather at the entrance chanting intimidatory slogans is a different sort of violence, one this documentary condones. ‘i’m Public Enemy no 1, me,’ smirked lynch. that’s a title usually reserved for gangsters — but unions are the real mafia now.
Getting away from the headlines, Phil Spencer had his smartphone switched off for the first of his Great British Dog Walks (More4). With his dog luna, a ten- month- old short- haired German pointer, he was setting out to hike coast-to-coast, from St Bees on the irish Sea to Robin Hood Bay on the north Sea. Fans of Go With noakes will remember Blue Peter’s cheerful daredevil doing something similar, yonks ago.
Along the way, Phil met former special forces trooper and presenter of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, Mark ‘Billy’ Billingham. Billy had brought his bulldog Alf, whose name is an acronym for the soldier’s motto, Always a little Further.
the two men swapped doggy stories. Billy described how sniffer dogs can be strapped into a parachutist’s harness and dropped by air into combat zones — which seems to be taking walkies a bit far, if you ask me.