British Airways and The Unite Union – Can They be Serious?

Industrial Dinosaurs: Derek Simpson of the Unite Union and Willie Walsh of BA

British Airways has won an injunction to stop the strike by cabin crew that was due to start today.

So who is in the right here, management or Union? The answer is clear. Both sides are 100% wrong.

It is obvious that striking against struggling BA is not in the long term interests of the crew. The strike can have only one effect – which is to damage the airline further. That in turn will cause further damage to the company’s ability to pay its staff, and mean that future deals on pay and conditions will be worse than they otherwise would have been.

The offer from BA, which the Union is opposing, contains measures that would be regarded as old hat in most companies.

They include:

• Reducing the number of cabin crew on long haul flights from 15 to 14. Would those staff really not be able to cope with that 7% reduction in staffing?
• A two-year pay freeze from 2010. That is now commonplace in many private companies (including the one I work for) and is about to be extended into the public sector.
• New contracts for fresh recruits and newly promoted staff, which would introduce a single on-board management grade, promotion on merit, no seniority and pay at market rates plus 10%. Frankly, it is astonishing that old-style nationalised industry restrictive practices like seniority and “Buggins’ Turn” promotion have survived as long as this at BA. It is also amazing that the Union have objected to “only” being paid 10% above the going rate.

However, the Union claims it has now reached agreement in principle on all of this with the airline. The sticking point now is travel concessions, which were withdrawn permanently from staff members who took part in a previous strike, and some disciplinary action that has been taken against “more than 50″ union members.

Those remaining issues do not sound to me like major ones that couldn’t be resolved by talking, without a damaging and disruptive strike.

Assuming, of course, that British Airways managers are keen to resolve the dispute. They went to court to stop the strike on a pure technicality. The claim was that the Union did not correctly notify its members of the results of the strike ballot. It is often said that the law is an ass, and in this case, the court provided ample justification for that view by supporting BA. Stupid though the strike is, getting the courts to stop it on such spurious grounds is misuse of the intention of the law, and brings that law into disrepute. BA should be ashamed of itself for that.

BA should also consider the effect on its staff. Eventually the only way forward for the company is for the staff and the management to work together as a single team. One day they will have to do that. Will misusing the law to stop a strike, when a big majority of staff voted in favour, bring that day any closer? Or will it further alienate staff and cause more resentment and ill feeling?

Looking at those industrial dinosaurs battling it out with strikes and retaliation by legal action, while the company faces an uncertain future and long term decline, is profoundly depressing.

I am going to Munich later this year for a holiday. I looked at several airlines for our flights. Easyjet were the cheapest – no surprise there. Lufthansa were only a little more expensive than Easyjet, and the difference was easy to justify based on the additional service you get like allocated seats.

And BA? Their price was 50% more expensive than Lufthansa. Why would I or anyone else choose to fly with them on those terms? Because we like the pretty red, white and blue uniforms?

The Beneficiaries of the BA Dispute

If the Union don’t like the management’s cost cutting proposals, they need to explain how they believe those cost differences should be addressed. And BA management need to explain why they have allowed this lack of competitiveness to fester for so long, when the company has been in the private sector for more than 20 years.

Both the Union and BA management need their heads knocking together. They need to understand that their passengers owe them nothing, any of them. If their airline collapses, nobody will mourn. Their competitors will be happy to take their airport slots, and eat their lunch.

None of us care about the Union’s grievances, or about the management’s macho desire to break the Union. If they can’t resolve their differences, we don’t care. There are lots of other airlines that will be happy to fly us wherever we want to go.

If they want a place in our future, BA and the Union should do a deal and get back to work, together, fighting their competitors for the business of people like me.

Meanwhile, my money will be putting lunch on the tables of Lufthansa’s German crews.

More Ash Cloud Nonsense

Travellers Face More Disruption as Quango Reimposes Flying Bans

Heathrow and Gatwick airports are to close again, on the orders of the Civil Aviation Authority, based on the Met Office computer model, which predicts that they will be at risk from a volcanic ash cloud that is too dense.

This comes after the week-long closures of airports across Europe in April, which were subsequently admitted to have been over-cautious. They were based on preventing flying anywhere where any ash was predicted by the computer model.

Richard Branson, of Virgin, did not mince his words on this latest closure:

The closing of Manchester airspace once again is beyond a joke.

All the test flights by airlines, aircraft and engine manufacturers have shown no evidence that airlines could not continue to fly completely safety.

It is obviously dangerous to fly through the mouth of a volcano as has been demonstrated time and time again on television by what happened to the BA plane. However the volcano is hundreds of miles away from the UK.

Over a thousand flights took off from France last week in similar conditions to that which exist in Manchester today without encountering any problems or showing any levels of ash concentration.

We need strong leadership to intervene to avoid doing further unnecessary damage to the UK economy and lives of travellers.

British Airways weighed in with:

The approach the airspace authorities have taken in relation to volcanic ash remains overly restrictive and not justified on safety grounds.

While we welcome the steps that have been taken since mid-April to moderate the restrictions, it is clear there is too much reliance on the theoretical model of ash spread produced by a single body: the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre.

Like other European operators, we have no confidence in this model as the basis for deciding closures of European airspace.

The airline industry has a great deal of experience in dealing safely with the potential risk posed by volcanic ash.

As a global airline, British Airways has operated for many years in areas of volcanic activity, and we believe airlines are best placed to take the final decisions on whether or not it is safe to fly. Safety will always be our over-riding priority.

All of which is pretty forceful criticism coming from those two airlines.

So what did the Civil Aviation Authority have to say about it? Their Chief Executive, Andrew Haines, said:

We are all working flat out to keep flying safe whilst minimising disruption from the volcano.

We face a massive challenge to do this. Firstly because the standard default procedure for aircraft that encounter ash, to avoid it completely, doesn’t work in our congested airspace.

Secondly, the top scientists tell us that we must not simply assume the effects of this volcano will be the same as others elsewhere.

Its proximity to the UK, the length of time it is continuously erupting and the weather patterns are all exceptional features.

The answer can only come, therefore, from aircraft manufacturers establishing what level of ash their products can safely tolerate.

This was agreed at an international aviation conference we held last Thursday, attended by all the leading airline operators (including Virgin and BA) where this approach was welcomed and supported. The manufacturers are co-operating fully and urgently in this task.

It’s the CAA’s job to ensure the public is kept safe by ensuring safety decisions are based on scientific and engineering evidence; we will not listen to those who effectively say ‘let’s suck it and see’.

And while their Chief Executive is spouting all this bluster, the CAA are engaged in an argument with Eurocontrol, the Europe-wide air traffic regulator, over whether it is necessary to have a 60 mile exclusion zone around any area of dense ash. On 10th May they produced a document entitled Rationale for the Removal of the Current Volcanic Ash Buffer Zone.

So here we have two levels of regulator, the national and the European, debating with each other about the parameters within which they work, while the lives of thousands of people are disrupted and the airlines are pushed further towards bankruptcy.

Phil Hammond, the new Transport Minister, really needs to get a grip on this and sort out this mess before what’s left of our economy is finished off by all this idiocy.

Does Blogging Matter?

Letters from a Tory Has Come to an End

Today is a sad day in the blogosphere as we all mourn the end of Letters from a Tory.

That blog has finally come to an end after 2,196 blog posts. And that means thousands of hours of work. If the author was a paid journalist, he would have earned tens of thousands of pounds for it. In his case, he used paid-for hosting (unlike stingy people like me who use the free WordPress service) and did not take advertising, so he was actually paying for the privilege of writing his blog.

What’s more, his standard was as high as that of the best mainstream journalists.

So why did he do all that work? I can’t speak for him, but I guess he wanted to make a difference to the world, to raise his voice above the mindless chatter of daily existence.

Anyone who writes a blog has to wonder whether it really does make any difference. Would the world really be a different place without that blog? Has it had any impact on the big wide world? Or is it just self-indulgent ranting?

The answer can only be that it is a bit like raising a family, or simply being a decent person. Will that make any real difference to the world? No, of course not. If my own children were badly brought up, or if I were rude to somebody at a bus stop, the impact on the world as a whole would be negligible.

But the impact on the people concerned, on the children or on that bus passenger, would not be negligible.

Blogs may be read by tens, or hundreds, or in the case of a blog like Letters from a Tory, I guess thousands of people. Every one of those people will have had their lives changed by reading it – otherwise they wouldn’t keep coming back for more day after day.

This is where the blogosphere is so different from the mainstream media. The engagement with the reader is much more personal, and much more two way. It’s a conversation, where the media are just somebody with a megaphone on Speaker’s Corner.

Does anyone care what the Sun thinks, or the Daily Mail, or even the Daily Telegraph? Even the politicians, who probably do care what is written about them in those papers, only care because of the impact they think it has on the papers’ readers. In reality, I suspect few of those readers really care what the Sun says. It wasn’t “The Sun Wot Won It” in 1992. It was people’s conversations with their neighbours, activists tramping the doorsteps, and people making their own minds up having heard the politicians themselves speak on television or radio. Those were the days before the web really took off. The blogs of today are like the conversations with the heighbours of those times.

People who read the same blogs every day, really do care about what is written there. They impact fewer people than a big newspaper, but the impact on each one is so much greater.

So you who are reading this, know that your visit here and your interest is extremely welcome!

What’s in a Name

Labour’s Education Rebranding Has Been Ditched

Michael Gove, the new Education supremo, has wasted no time in stamping his authority on his department.

New Labour rebranded it “The Department for Children, Schools and Families”, complete with a pretty rainbow logo and no capital letters, to show how warm and friendly it was. They gave it responsibilities for tackling child obesity, and even for youth crime.

Mr Gove is having none of that. He has changed its name back to “The Department for Education”.

You might say that all this really isn’t very important. But it is. This change, minor though it is, is a sign that the wasted Labour years are over.

The fuzziness, spin and marketing drivel of Labour is gone, and the department is going to get back to the serious business of doing its job.

Good start, Mr Gove.

Carpe Diem

As for all Conservatives, election night brought for me the pleasure of being on the winning side. But it also brought some disappointment, in that we did not obtain that overall majority.

During the campaign, a number of bloggers and some mainstream media commentators had suggested that a Conservative victory would be disastrous for the party. Their argument was that Britain’s economic situation was so bad, and the necessary cuts and tax increases would be so awful, that whichever party made them would be severely punished by the electorate afterwards.

They said that the Tories should be happy to lose the election, and let Labour clear up the mess they had made.

Even the Governor of the Bank of England speculated that the party who did the nasty deeds would be out of power for a generation.

And yet, of course, another Labour victory would have been a disaster for our country – and indeed for morale in our party – and so most of us worked as hard as we could for a victory.

The assumption of all of us was that a hung parliament would lead to a Liberal-Labour coalition. Therefore, if the Tories did not win outright, they would be in opposition again. On election night, our disappointment came from that belief.

In the event, Britain was amazingly lucky. The hung parliament wasn’t just hung. It was hung in such a way that the Liberals and Labour together could not control the House of Commons. Most of us saw that on election night, and many of us called for a Liberal-Conservative coalition.

What we did not do was link these two thoughts together:

The party that governs in these difficult times will face the wrath of the electorate

and

The only stable government now available is a Liberal-Conservative one.

Consider then David Cameron. He led his party into this election having detoxified it and made it credible once again. He fought and battled for weeks campaigning for victory. And then he saw the bitter disappointment of seeing all those efforts come to nothing as the majority wasn’t forthcoming.

And yet, even then, he was able to do what none of us did – to link those two propositions together. He saw the opportunity that the unlikely House of Commons maths gave him to solve both the problems at a stroke. He would form a majority and at the same time turn away some of the wrath of the electorate, by linking with the Liberals.

And not in a half-hearted way. He didn’t want a supply-and-confidence arrangement. He wanted a full-blooded coalition, with Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers, collective responsibility and shared policies.

In that way, he would not only salvage victory from the jaws of defeat. He would do better than that. He would win an outcome better than he could have had by governing alone had he won outright.

David Cameron saw all of that in a night that must have been at first one of the most bitterly disappointing of his life.

Not many people can stay calm and think straight in a crisis. But to have the vision to see how that crisis could be turned into an opportunity, and to have the courage and decisiveness to seize that opportunity, is the mark of greatness.

And David Cameron moves up another notch in my estimation. Of course, he may fail. And it is also fair to say that Nick Clegg too showed more vision than many in his party, and himself moved to take the opportunity that Mr Cameron had offered him. Mr Clegg, and his Liberal colleagues who have been willing to swallow their doubts and accept this offer, have played a full part in the creation of this coalition government.

But it was David Cameron who seized the day. Let the carpers, whingers and doubters in both parties keep silent. Today is Mr Cameron’s day, and Mr Clegg’s. Who knows what the future may bring for us all. But we will face it together.

Maths and Politics

Practising for His Future Political Career

I am sometimes asked by my children what possible use maths could be to them in real life. I always mumble something about it being surprisingly useful in all sorts of areas.

In the past, though, I never quite realised just how important it could be in politics.

Consider, for example the mundane issue of fixed term parliaments. They are going to be one of the first acts of Britain’s new coalition government.

This will remove from the Prime Minister the right to decide on the timing of the election. This has in the past been a key power that Prime Ministers have had, allowing them to choose a time when they thought they could win.

“Fixed term” parliaments certainly mean the Prime Minister can no longer choose to call an election early. But the parliament will still come to an end if a motion of “no confidence” is passed in the government. Apparently in future a majority of 55 percent will be required to do this, compared with a bare majority, 50 percent, now.

This means that the votes of 45 percent of the MP’s will be needed to block an early election. 45 percent of MP’s is 293 in the current parliament.

The Conservatives currently have 306 seats in the parliament, meaning that they will be able to prevent an election being called even if a no confidence motion has a majority in the Commons.

Therefore, the Conservatives will be able to prevent a new election being called even if the other parties (including the Liberal Democrats) want one.

Imagine a scenario in which the Liberal Democrats walk out of the coalition. Or imagine a scenario in which the Tories decide to dispense with the Liberal Democrats, and themselves walk out of the coalition. In either case, David Cameron would remain Prime Minister, at the head of a minority government, and be able to prevent a new election.

Therefore, although the Tory government would at that point be a minority government, it effectively could not be brought down by the other parties. Of course, they could prevent that government doing business, precipitating a constitutional crisis. If they did that, then public services would come to a halt and the Tories could blame the others for bringing them to a halt.

This would be a curious situation that cannot arise now. The government would not have the votes to force any measures through the house. But it would have the votes to prevent a new election.

All this is, of course, the reason for the 55 percent stipulation. If it was a bare majority, as now, required to force an election, then the Tories wouldn’t have the votes to block it. That would leave them dependent on the goodwill of the Liberals to survive.

There’s more. Imagine David Cameron wanted a new election. He could put down a motion of confidence in his government. The others would clearly be politically obliged to vote against. He would abstain, telling the press that it was a technical device to force an election.

It is therefore hard not to conclude that the Liberals have been skewered on this. They have given up the right to bring down the Tory government within the next five years, in exchange for a coalition that will come to an end whenever the Conservatives decide to end it.

And that can only mean that Tory strategists paid more attention than the Liberals did to their maths teachers at school.

Habemus Papam

After a couple of anxious days of speculation and rumour, the white smoke has appeared over Conservative Central Office and a new Prime Minister has finally been chosen.

The fortunes of the various factions involved ebbed and flowed, as first one and then another seemed to have the upper hand. At times the spirit of the old Prime Minister seemed to float over the whole proceedings, like a rather paternalistic shadow.

The key discussions took place behind closed doors, and the information issuing therefrom was mostly rumour, speculation and guesswork. The media resorted to endless interviews with figures from the past, who had no part in the proceedings, pretending that those people somehow had an inside track on what was going on.

But now, finally, the old Prime Minister is gone, and a new one will take his place.

Britain’s New Prime Minister

David Cameron has been chosen to take the poisoned chalice of Number 10.

Mr Cameron is thought to be rather more Conservative than his predecessor. Writers in the media have suggested that he may be a supporter of marriage and the family, and even that he may believe in rewarding thrift. Others have pointed to his good manners and sense of fair play, and wondered if he has enough of a killer instinct to confront his foes.

But many others admit that they once had little time for him, but have been completely won over by those very qualities that are held in such contempt by his enemies.

The new Prime Minister faces chronic and endemic problems, and will need to adopt radical solutions to deal with them.

At the time, we must hope long into the future, when he too has departed from his new Office, will he be remembered as the man whose talent was too limited to tackle the huge issues he faced? Or will he be remembered as the man who gave his country a fresh start, who created opportunities from the problems, and was a true leader for his people?

Time will tell.

Today is a day simply to rejoice that the waiting is finally over. We have a new Prime Minister.

May God give him wisdom and authority. And let all Conservatives everywhere, and indeed all of the British people, pledge him our allegiance. He will need our support in the difficult days ahead.

Will the Liberals Miss Their Opportunity?

Significance or Ruin. Hmm. That’s a Tricky One

The Tories have offered the Liberal Democrats a referendum on moving to the Alternative Vote system, a variation of First Past the Post that is apparently more attractive to the Liberals.

And they have seemingly offered a move to fixed term parliaments.

It is hard to see what more the Conservatives could do to get a coalition deal with the Liberals.

The Liberal Democrats have just been trounced once again in an election. Regardless of the voting system, they came third. The Tories were first. Labour were second.

This is obvious but bears repeating, since the Liberals seem to be having trouble understanding it.

While they were negotiating with the Conservatives over the weekend, it is now clear that they were also having secret talks with Labour. Those talks centered around the Liberals helping to keep Labour, fresh from their election defeat, in office, in return for voting reforms that would help the Liberals in future elections. We are told that even the Conservatives did not know that the Liberals were also talking to Labour.

Having posed during the election campaign as the clean-living new politicians who weren’t like “the old parties”, it is now abundantly clear that they are very much run-of-the-mill hungry-for-power greasers after all.

It’s just that they are less successful ones than the other two parties.

I have said before that the only hope for a stable government now is for the Liberals to go into coalition with the Conservatives. It is clear that the Tories are willing to make serious concessions to the Liberals to get a deal done. If the Liberals act like grown-ups, and prove themselves trust-worthy coalition partners, the resulting government could last a full term and get many Liberal policies implemented.

This is not an auspicious start.

The alternative for the Liberals is to follow the siren voices of Labour. That would prove to everybody the depths of cynicism to which the Liberals could sink. And the resulting government would be astonishingly weak, relying for power on support from several tiny parties with conflicting aims.

That weak government would be grappling with a crisis of historic proportions, with a lame duck Prime Minister and no Commons majority.

The Liberals might well not get their beloved voting reform. And almost certainly, the government would last only a few months before collapsing. That would lead to an election in which the Liberals would be seen to have thumbed their noses at the electorate by propping up a defeated Labour party. The Tories would make hay with their slogan “vote Clegg, get Miliband” (amend names as appropriate) and everyone would know that a Liberal vote was a wasted vote.

The Liberals would probably be smashed down to a tiny rump, of the kind that David Steel used to lead. Their hard work and steady advances of 30 years would be wiped out.

Or they could go with the Tories, help deliver a strong and stable government by acting as willing, responsible and trustworthy partners. They could use their position in the coalition to stop the Conservative policies that they found most objectionable, but push through the many measures upon which the parties can agree. They could go into the next election with their heads held high, as the party that helped the Tories clean up Labour’s mess.

The decision now facing the Liberals will determine whether they have a future in British politics.

Bye, Gordon

“That is good”, said the fish. “He has gone away. Yes.
But your mother will come. She will find this big mess!
And this mess is so big and so deep and so tall
We cannot pick it up, there is no way at all.”

The Cat in the Hat
Dr Zeuss

Gordon Brown has announced that he is stepping down as party leader.

And not before time. Many people wanted him to go last year. And that was just the people in his own party.

Enoch Powell said that all political careers end in failure. Gordon Brown has been no exception. And he started as he meant to go on.

With Prudence. For a Purpose. And the purpose was to pour other people’s money into failing and unreformed public services.

From his tax raid on Britain’s rock solid pension funds, to his flogging of Britain’s gold at the bottom of the market; from his borrowing boom that gave Britain the illusion of prosperity, to his hundreds of stealth tax rises; from his botched and stupid tax credit system to his extension of pensions means testing; this politician has been a walking disaster.

He started as Chancellor with failure, masked by Tony Blair’s skilful spinning and presentation; and ended in failure, with a drubbing in his only election as leader and an unseemly scramble to cling onto power with Liberal support.

He leaves our country poorer (the first Prime Minister to do so for many decades); in fact, he leaves a mess that will tax the best efforts of politicians to clear it up, for many decades to come.

I wish him very well in his retirement; I hope he will take the opportunity to spend much more time with his lovely wife (who never deserved the sneering she got from the press) and his children. I hope he will write his memoirs, and even manage to find a publisher who might print a few hundred copies. And I hope they don’t get remaindered too quickly.

And I earnestly hope that his contribution to British politics from now on will be very, extremely, vanishingly small.

Britain and the Eurozone Bailout Fund

Despite being Hard to Swallow, Darling’s Deal is in Britain’s Interest

The European Union has agreed a €750 billion deal to provide emergency support to Eurozone countries that may get into difficulty. This is in addition to the €110 billion aid package for Greece, which was approved last Friday.

Eurozone countries will provide most (€440 billion) of the new funding. The rest, however, will come from the International Monetary Fund and from the European Commission. Non-Eurozone countries will have to contribute towards those extra funds.

Britain will apparently have to provide £8 billion of the IMF and European Commission money. No doubt, after he contributed hundreds of billions of pounds to prop up Britain’s banks, £8 billion seemed like small beer to Mr Darling. It is not – not least because this money is being used to prop up other countries, and not to prop up our own banks.

The aid package is being pushed through under EU rules that provide for such action in emergencies without the right of veto for individual countries. So Mr Darling did not have the right to stop it, even if he had wanted to.

No doubt many will complain about Britain being asked to contribute towards a fund that is expressly designed to prop up Eurozone countries only, and avoid a default by one of those countries that would imperil the European currency. Spain and Portugal are the two countries most often mentioned as being at risk, but there could be others in the future.

However, it is not only Britain that will be a non-Eurozone member contributing to this deal. The United States, especially, that provides a signficant part of IMF funding, will be contributing.

The Eurozone is by far Britain’s biggest trading partner and export market. The collapse of the Euro would cause massive disruption to European economies, and therefore enormous further damage to the UK (and the US).

The UK’s £8 billion would only be lost if the borrowing countries were to default, which is unlikely. Their governments seem to understand very clearly, as do the Conservatives in Britain, that their deficits need to be trimmed urgently. If they did default after being provided with this aid, the resulting economic shock to the UK would make £8 billion look like pocket money.

The £8 billion exposure to this deal is unpalatable, but Mr Darling really did have no choice but to accept it – regardless of whether he had the right to veto it.

One question does remain. It is entirely conceivable that Britain may find itself in the same situation as Spain and Portugal soon, given that our government borrowing is also at unsustainable levels. If we do face a market refusal to buy British bonds, will the Eurozone help us as we are now helping them? Don’t hold your breath.