Bin charges won’t trigger our winter of discontent
World of Politics with Harry McGee – [email protected]
The Winter of Discontent – when not in its original context of Shakespeare’s Richard III – is usually take to refer to a turbulent period in British politics in 1978 when the unions essentially shut the country down. It started when the government of Prime Minister James Callaghan introduced a cap on pay in an effort to stem rampant inflation.
Most of the public sector unions ended up going on strike that winter – the most crippling of which were the domestic waste strikes, with bins left uncollected for weeks.
The irony of it was that this led to the collapse of that Labour government and paved the way for the Tories to return to power, with their new leader Margaret Thatcher.
On this side of the water, the conclusion of the Jobstown Trial means we have probably seen the end of the water charges fiasco – tellingly in a week that saw Minister Denis Naughten announce new arrangements for domestic waste charges.
Firstly it should be said that the charges pressed by the Director of Public Prosecutions were ludicrous – and because of a cock-up, the option to press less serious public order offences was lost because they did not bring them within the six months period.
That meant the trial had the air of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
And it played into the hand of the socialist revolutionaries who made it into a propaganda war – the downtrodden versus the establishment; the social media warriors against the mainstream media.
The left-wing parties, and Solidarity-PBP in particular, have been clever in the causes they have championed, making stances on behalf of ‘people’ and making outlandish promises on spending that would make the king of pyramid schemes, Bernie Madoff, blush.
It’s incredible to me how often the tosh that’s sometimes pushed is taken as gospel or as some kind of objective truth.
Having said that, there are some really good initiatives. And you can’t but admire the unrelenting commitment of their public representatives and supporters to the cause.
But there is some part of their agenda which I find inherently, and worryingly, anti-democratic. They see parliament as a tool in the same way that Jews and Muslims see Jesus as a prophet but not the chosen one.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.