Work Safe - NOT

Labour can't win either way on brexit/remain from a numbers perspective. Their traditional voters are split 1/3rd brexit, 2/3rds remain. However, the brexit 1/3rd were more heavily on the left, where the party has decided to concentrate its direction, at the cost of losing its more centre voters. If it were to move to a remain position, it would lose both its left and centre voters. (It's already thought it's lost a significant part of its left to Conservatives, purely because they don't think Labour is brexit enough, and they feel more strongly about brexit than they do about Labour/socialism.)

This shows the difference in position between the Labour Party members, and the traditional Labour voters.

Conserveratives have exactly the same issue in mirror image. However, Conservative remainers are much less likely to vote non-Conservative than Labour brexiters are likey to vote non-Labour. Conservatives will almost certainly lose some seats to LibDems, but nowhere near as many as they stand to gain from Labour (bearing in mind they'll probably get all 5M UKIP votes too).

If Labour were nearer the centre (e.g. New Labour), then a Labour remain stance would work from a figures perspective, because it would match the views of a much larger number of traditional Labour voters, and they could steal the Conservative remainers, and probably all the LibDem votes too.

If you didn't see an angle grinder, they might actually have known what they were doing.

And that is because of a striking workforce?

You are not stupid merely a s*it, stirring s*it. You know that and everyone else knows it.

In that case you'll recall how industrial relations got so bad that we had rubbish piling up in the streets, soldiers driving fire engines, and the three day week.

Compared with that, even bearing in mind the SR thing, we have no real problems.

Several sources point to tens of millions of work days being lost to strikes in the 70s, compared to hundreds of thousands now.

Andy

True. You flood the country with immigrants willing to to virtually any job under any conditions. Change from staff jobs to so called self employment. Zero hours contracts, etc. That is the easy way to keep the workforce in their place.

The employment rules stop that most of the time. Its only the racists that exploit the illegal immigrants that make them work below the legal levels.

Employment rules only really apply to the employed. Hence all these self employed doing jobs once done by staff. And the taxman losing out heavily from those now not on PAYE, who would have been in older times.

Plenty UK born seem to prefer living off benefits than working for a minimum wage. And you don't have to be a racist to exploit workers. Just the average capitalist. ;-)

Andrew Gabriel wrote: snip

OTOH, they would then be Tories. While it would be a great gravy train ticket for Labour MPs it would not do the rest of us any good, as we would then have elected the Tory 'B' team and be in the same position as now, minus a bit of political skill.

The 1970s entailed the Labour Party making the first moves at globalisation and lowering real wages. And then blaming the Trade Union movement for trying to resist this. Rather successfully, it seems, but that does not make it the unions' fault.

The unions have always been keen on trying to have employers retain jobs that don't exist any more.

The laws apply to "self employed" too. Its really only sole traders that can avoid the laws. Most of them want to avoid the laws.

Possibly, but that's a completely separate issue.

It is the job of a union to protect member's jobs. Much as the Mail etc thinks they should be doing things 'for the benefit of the country'. Ie, those in charge.

Someone needs to explain to them that protecting their members jobs doesn't work when you drive the company to bankruptcy. They should have worked out by now that they can't try to overthrow the government and protect jobs like Scargill thought he could.

Dave means they are there to protect their jobs.

Care to give an example?

Tee-hee. Are you trying to say there would still be coal mines in the UK if Scargill had never existed?

There would have been more chance than with him.

Don't be so silly. Coal could be imported far more cheaply than mined in the UK. Which is exactly what happened.