Man in a Shed: Trade Unions

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Just what is going on with the strikes at the Lindsey refinery ?

Did Labour repeal all the trade union laws and I didn't notice ?

It certainly looks like the strike is organised. It certainly looks like secondary strikes are in action. And didn't I just hear on the radio about a mass meeting with a show of hands rejecting and offer from the company - so no secret ballots there then ( that also looks illegal ).

Just what is going on ?

Okay I ready to get egg on my face if I have missed Labour paying of their Union masters by quietly ditching the reforms of the 80s, I'd just like to know where we stand.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman