In fact the anti-union rants of right wing pundits are so rabid that Seamus possibly understated the case.
Firstly, disregarding decades of union engagement with public service reform, the Spectator accuses public sector unions of Luddism ‘the TUC campaign would have force if it was directed at improving the quality of public services. In fact, it is just designed to maintain the working practices of their members, right or wrong.’
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6273968/how-the-unions-oppose-the-achievement-of-more-for-less.thtml
Next comes the discredited ex-Tory MP Neil Hamilton ‘in the real world, there is massive scope for cutting non-jobs and making the public sector smaller and more efficient…..as everybody knows. Except the boneheads in the TUC’.
http://www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/200362/Neil-Hamilton?
Finally, the most bizarre analysis of all is a Sunday Telegraph article by veteran hard right pundit Janet Daley with lurid tales of communities persecuted by marauding refuse collectors in demand of Xmas tips! Daley’s attempts to incite anti union public sentiment will be familiar to those who have heard crude political abuse traded by Neanderthal US shock-jocks: ‘there can be no conciliation – no meeting halfway – with people who are completely at cross purposes. The militant voices at the TUC conference and, depressingly, even most of the supposedly moderate ones, were not in the same game as us. They do not want to make the free-market system work more fairly or more mercifully. They do not want to make it work at all. They actually believe that the need for real wealth creation is a myth: that money (as Marx held) is simply a “relation” and that you can expand its supply infinitely to provide unending jobs and services, without any consequences.’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/8010988/The-nightmare-of-union-power-is-back-again.html
At this rate, we’ll soon be reading that British trade unions are a threat to civilisation.