To supplement an earlier post, here's Barnet NUT on the pensions demonstration in central London today. My sense of the day was that the strikes - those by teachers and civil servants, I don't know about lecturers, though I would guess those as well - were well supported, and spirits were high among those taking action. Certainly, people enjoyed the march and rallies (there were two since you couldn't fit everyone into Westminster Central Hall).
Ed Miliband has made a tit of himself today condemning the strikes; this evening he posted a really lame defence of his earlier remarks - the comments (most of them) are spot on.
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What amazingly hypocritical times we live in. When the people who caused the financial crisis were asked to show restraint, they threatened to withdraw their labour (by moving to some tax-free utopia); immediately all sides of the political hierarchy fell to their knees prostrating themselves before the gods of the City, begging them not to leave and allowing them to continue with their unfettered bonuses and minimal corporation taxes paid for by bail-outs and "austerity measures" etc.
THEN when the teachers and civil servants, the victims of the City charlatans, withdraw THEIR labour by striking, the politicians cry "foul". How dare these horrible public servants complain? Don't they realise that they are lucky to live in a country that cannot afford Museums but can afford to bomb the shit out of bits of North Africa (and £500K per cruise missile is a bargain).
One thing I've learned however: the definition of "gold plated". "Gold Plated" as applied to pensions means "not yet pissed away by gambling on the stock market".
Might I correct the heading to this post in order to increase its accuracy:
Barnet teachers fighting for my money
That's right, DD, teachers' salaries and pensions (teachers are taxpayers as well, btw) are paid for from taxes.
If we didn't have a state education system we would have a lot of uneducated gutter snipes running around, and any kind of productive activity would be fairly impossible.
The Victorians worked that one out. I can see why you live in the country.
"we would have a lot of uneducated gutter snipes running around"
In view of experience and just about every report from everyone concerned, except teachers and Labour politicians, we actually have "a lot of uneducated gutter snipes running around".
The teachers who worked are admirable in that they remembered that their first, indeed, their only, duty is to the children they teach. The unutterable scum who left their pupils in the lurch should be sacked.
The "unutterable scum" are people like you who consider that a huge tranche of society have a duty to be exploited.
Obviously, Mickey, your English teacher failed to explain exactly what 'exploitation' means. Earning the sort of money teachers earn for doing even less work than they used to do - the poor dears now need 'classroom assistants' - and doing the work, on the whole, exceedingly poorly according to just about every neutral analytical observer, they should keep very quiet and hope no-one notices just how much they are costing us all.
Still, if you, and they, are convinced that our poor down-trodden teachers are suffering in the same way as some Indian peasant slaving away in a workshop for 10 cents a day, then they can always pack it in and try something else. Of course, outside the cosy area of public employment you actually have to do enough to justify your pay.
But of course, most teachers do not think they are exploited because most teachers stayed at work. ONly the scum walked out on their children.
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