Public sector strikes are very old politics  

Today there will be a strike of some public sector workers over cuts in redundancy payments. I don’t expect the government to suddenly give in owing to industrial action. The strikers might be disappointed at how little impact there is from their inaction. I can understand employees’ frustration at unilateral changes to their terms and conditions. They are paying the price of their employer’s failure to run the public accounts sensibly and to motivate and lead staff professionally to get better results. It is the culmination of bad handling of recruitment, training, retention and dismissal in Labour’s public sector. The strike reflects badly on both sides. A good employer should not need to make too many employees redundant, because he would not have over recruited in the first place. Redundancies can be an unhappy necessity in a business where demand suddenly...