Kevin McKenna: Why can't those trade unions just behave and know their place?

THOSE trade unions are at it again: fighting for their members; trying to secure better pay and conditions. All the decent people are trying to celebrate Her Majesty’s platinum jubilee and helping Boris to put the pandemic parties behind him so that he can run the country in peace. But there’s those unions; always revolting; never happy with their lot; always trying to get above their station in life. I think it’s time we put these pirates in their place.
Obviously, we can’t have working-class people running around on salaries approaching £50k-a-year. The hidden dangers of paying people who simply aren’t accustomed to having money in their pockets at the end of the working week are really quite upsetting. They’ll simply spend it all on drink and risk tipping the country into an on-line gambling frenzy.
Never having been accustomed to such life-changing quantums of poppy, their innocent way of life could be wrecked by the psychological consequences. All those choices; all those dilemmas; all that peace of mind. It could totally overwhelm them. Should we buy a new car? Should we go to Cancun for wur holidays? What’s a savings account?
I’ve personally seen what can happen when rough-hewn and edgy people try to buy quality goods inappropriate to their social status or gain admittance to golf clubs. They realise too late that they weren’t bred for these places and feel humiliated when they don’t fit in. Then they seek solace in multi-pack chocolate bars and Glen’s vodka; gain weight and lose their self-esteem. This leads to crippling rates of absenteeism and bouts of sartorial delinquency. This, in turn, makes our town centres look unattractive and deters inward investment.
It surely can’t be a coincidence that Britain enjoyed its greatest period in history when trade unions weren’t around. We simply wouldn’t have been able to annexe the New World, win the Napoleonic wars and enslave Africa if the chaps had all been given time off for their holidays and sick pay every time they got a mild doze of typhoid or a touch of cancer.
And you could say cheerio to the industrial revolution. Do you think all those titans of industry would have been able to make all that money for the country if the workers had been allowed to strike? Or been allowed to work for less than 120 hours a week? Soon, they’d all have been reading and filling their heads with complicated ideas and having sex and stuff like that. We’d never have beaten the Kaiser, never mind Hitler and would have probably ended up like the French.
I think, as a civilised nation, we need to urge the mainstream media to show a degree of responsibility in how they report sensitive items of news about how much money middle-class and upper-class people make. Is it really helpful to report that hard-working and deserving billionaires were rewarded for their industry and ingenuity with a profits bonanza during lockdown?
Is it absolutely necessary to report that the chief executive to employee pay ratio was 63:1 in the first few months of 2022? And that this was double what it had been last year? When these numbers are reported baldly it can led to jealousy of the sort that trade unions exploit ruthlessly. The media really needs to show restraint. Perhaps newspaper proprietors could be a little more judicious in their recruitment policies.
And can someone please have a word with Rupert Murdoch about publishing his rich list every year? When we’re trying to get the punters to be fiscally responsible it doesn’t really send out the right message. Can’t we toss him a peerage or ask Her Majesty to receive him? Perhaps we could give him an exclusive the next time we invade someone.
Regrettably, I think our long and wretched experiment with providing educational opportunities for the lower orders has run its course. This seemed like a good idea at the time, especially as lots of them had helped us to defeat that Mr Hitler chappie. The only problem with this though – and it's one we ought really to have foreseen – is that we gave out too many of those bloody degrees.
Now they all think they’re middle class just because they’ve got a graduation gown. Now, they’re all swanning around demanding well-paid jobs as though they’d graduated from Oxford. The deluded blighters even want to be senior officers in the army and have senior civil service jobs, begad. They’ll be wanting to be High Court judges next and captain the England cricket team.
It’s the doctors and dentists I really feel sorry for. Their parents work their fundaments off to get them private tuition and a place at St Aloysius or Kelvinside. Then they spend six years of hard study and gruelling gap years in Kathmandu. The least they can expect is to be paid significantly more than those damned train drivers. It doesn’t matter that they’ll go on to make substantial six-figure salaries doing private medicine. To know that for an entire year Wullie and Betty in the council estate with their garden trampolines and their Sky Sport subscriptions and their pit bulls will be earning the same as them must be very dispiriting.
In extreme cases it might lead to children in Newton Mearns seeking careers in the railways or refuse collection. It could soon catch on and then, well … what would be the point of fee-paying schools if Phoebe and Sebastian just want jobs in the Hi-Vis sector with lots of time off? The bloody country would grind to a halt and we’d be sitting ducks for Putin and the Chinese.
We need to phase out trade unions with imaginative deployment of existing sedition laws. Then we replace them with regional boards of fiscal responsibility. These would have the right sort of people: professionals who know how to handle money and the consequences of having too much of it like accountants, lawyers and retired academics. Perhaps we could get the John Smith Centre or a corporate lobbying firm to start spreading the message.