Heir to who?

“Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' Great hilarity in Battsby Towers as  I wake to news of lefty fuckwittery on a grandiose scale. Such fun, as Frances O’Grady, the secret squirrel of the TUC (see picture) embarks on an endeavour ready-made to be mired in ridicule and doomed to abject humiliation. In a tacit admission of the total failure of socialism in Britain she last-resorts to invoking the spirit of Labour voters’ most hated and feared adversary, the sainted Maggie T.

In the Daily Mirror she is quoted as saying, “Ed Miliband has the potential to shape Britain on the scale Thatcher did.” Really, Frances? Maybe she hasn't noticed lately but Ed’s authority in his own party has been bumping along the bottom for some time and his standing in the rest of the country can best be summed up as “Who?”. Ed’s incumbency as – and I hesitate to use the word – leader, has been characterised by being not so much light on policy but devoid of policy; if his shadow cabinet doesn't appear to know what he stands for, what chance the electorate?

The last effective political act he carried out was stabbing his brother in the back and even that was manipulated entirely by the unions. His colleagues talk about what a very nice man he is; the political equivalent of not speaking ill of the dead. Ed’s potential? At the moment I doubt anybody would trust him to get the morning coffee order right. “They didn’t have your skinny-choco-café-latte, so I got, er… I did the right thing, the-the-the-the right thing... I got nothing.”

More detail can be read in the Daily Mail where her ‘warning’ of unrest and strikes is a thinly veiled call to arms – workers unite – nailing the TUC’s Marxist credentials firmly to the mast. Even as the recent OECD pronouncement predicts cautiously increased economic growth she wastes no time in saying people will (for which read ‘should’) “demand ‘their fair share of the rewards.”

Echoing Miliband’s and Ball’s own pronouncements she calls for full employment, decent and affordable homes and fair pay without a single mention of how this might be achieved. Presumably by a return to nineteen-sixties, big-state, nationalised socialism and 80% tax rates for anybody daring to be successful. All this she asks of poor Mr Ed at a time when the GMB has announced cutting its affiliation funding from £1.2million to £150,000 presumably because Ed is doing such a great job sticking up for their members.

TUC – give us all your nuts.

But don’t panic because in an ever changing world there are still rocks to cling on to and the time-honoured union leader “I’m all right Jack” mentality shows no sign of being eroded. The TUC’s £105,000 ‘golden goodbye’ to O’Grady’s predecessor, Brendan Barber, could happen again, she admitted. Ms O’Grady said the payout of one year’s pay was ‘custom and practice’ for TUC leaders, adding, “Who knows where we will be when I get to retire?” Better paid, I wonder? What was that saying about leopards and spots?