A Place to Stand

  This letter in today's Scotsman. Not often I disagree with Brian and in fact here I don't much. He was making the point that the government employee strikers were being greedy in trying to keep better terms than the productive sector can afford, which is not wrong and I am saying that if they do exercise their right to strike the government has a duty to show the same determination to oppose them that any commercial manager would. Sometimes it is worth putting 2 sides of a free market debate rather than letting discussion just be between pro and anti strikers. I suspect Brian was showing more support of the Cameron government's position than he actually feels.

   Perhaps the Scotsman decided to use this, which I do not regard as one of my best, because of their (& every other paper's) refusal to publish any of my letters on the Dalgety Bay "radiation" hazard being background and "less than 2/3rds that of a typical Aberdeen street" according to SEPA's  own consultants which I would consider more newsworthy. 

For once I would like to disagree with Brian Monteith’s criticism of the government workers’ strike (Perspective, 28 November).
Striking is an inherent right in a free society.
However, that comes with certain consequences. It is also the duty of elected politicians to serve the interests of the electorate, who pay for it, rather than the government employees.
Mass trade unionism survives alone in the public sector because the politicians, unlike the managers of other businesses, support it for purely political reasons.
By striking, the unions have shown it is government’s duty to be as concerned about getting value for money and making unproductive workers redundant as any other employer. Nobody is forced to work for the state, and they have no right to better conditions than the rest of us.