A TALE OF TWO pictures. The first is a nice sunny photograph published in The Times of a local government employee in Westminster during the one-day strike over pensions. She is smiling and playing with a tousle-haired young daughter in one hand, and a limp pile of The Socialist (son of the Militant Tendency) in the other. It is unclear whether they are picketing or picnicking.

The second is a murky 25-year old photo recently sent to me by an old friend from Manchester. It shows striking engineering workers including my friend Dave, and their left-wing supporters including a student Hume, shouting and shoving at ranks of police who were trying to break a workers’ occupation and close the factory on a freezing winter dawn. There do not appear to be any smiling children present.

It has been claimed that Tuesday’s national walkout was the biggest since the General Strike, and that the trade unions were rekindling “the spirit of 1926”. Presumably that is spirit as in phantom, not real. Anybody who seriously thinks that such one-day token protests bear the ghost of a resemblance to industrial struggles does not understand either the past or the present.

Instead, those two pictures reminded me of a stark contrast. In the early 1980s strikes, class and solidarity still meant something. This week’s phantom strikes were more like PR stunts, with a few child-friendly protests aimed at the cameras. The impact of the walkout seemed much the same as the nationwide vomiting bug that has closed schools and offices: shrugged off as a minor inconvenience.

Dave, a Marxist for more than half a century who, as a young conscript sailor, was imprisoned for trying to organise a union in the Royal Navy, points out that even in the 1980s industrial militancy was already on its last legs. Today’s unions are empty shells of their former selves, whose dreams of yesterday are matched by their nightmares about tomorrow, symbolised by the new focus on pensions rather than pay.

I am not nostalgic about freezing my student ears off while waltzing around with the Greater Manchester Police outside rundown factories. But it will take more than a day out with the kids to change things. It might be a start if we could pension off all those who peddle self-deluding fantasies about the past, and self-defeating fears about the future.

• SOME OF US might have imagined that economic growth could help to solve problems such as our ageing society. It now turns out that we are not only naive, but virtually neo-Nazis. Colin Challen, Labour MP and chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group, claims “there is a case to answer” that economic growth is now akin to the Third Reich, causing genocide through global warming. There is a stronger case to answer that the “N” word has become the last refuge of the irrational in any debate.

  Speaking of the irrational, here comes that well-known climatologist the Archbishop of Canterbury, warning that “millions, billions” of people could die of global warming, and that political leaders will face “a heavy responsibility before God” if they fail to control climate change. Sort of “Thy carbon-free Kingdom come, Thy will be done/In the recycling box, as it is in Heaven.”

  All of which confirms that the scientific debate about climate change is being hijacked by those on a moral crusade to make us change our sinful ways. It might help to clarify the true situation if we could reduce the emissions of globaldegook from our overheated doom-mongers.

  Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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