Bring Back the Guillotine posted by bat020

Posted by Bat

This filthy class traitor deserves a haircut, Jacobin style:

A senior Labour MP condemned the Transport and General Workers Union for being "spineless" in failing to confront militants who cause regular summer travel misery at Heathrow.

Barry Sheerman, chairman of the Commons Education Select Committee, said a "malign influence" was at work in the airport, which has been hit by disruption three years in a row. It is "no accident" the rows flare up in August as "they are pre-planned and plotted", according to the Huddersfield MP.

"There is some malign influence at Heathrow that is putting these things on in August," Mr Sheerman said. "There is no doubt about it, we have a leadership out of control at Heathrow, the T&G particularly has no backbone. It is spineless union leadership." [source]

The real "malign influence" at Heathrow that the T&G leadership should stand up to is, of course, the management of BA and Gate Gourmet. But our glorious Business Leaders can do no wrong in the eyes of deferential cretins like Sheerman (who, incidentally, lists "political entrepreneurship" as one of his interests on his website). Hence his dismal recourse to paranoid fantasies about "militants" pulling the strings.

Socialist Worker's latest update on Heathrow notes the following:

An insidious line of questioning from some sections of the media was that the solidarity action was the result of Asian family ties. In fact, the BA baggage handlers and ground crew who took action are overwhelmingly white.

Gate Gourmet worker Jonathan Gardener had a clear explanation for the solidarity, "Look, I'm Cornish and a lot of my workmates here are Punjabi. But we're brothers. We are in the same union branch as the BA workers. So that makes them our brothers too. You can call that a family connection if you like."

Fellow worker Michael Allen added, "People have worked for this company for a long time. Some of them were here when it was part of BA, before it was tendered out. There are lots of connections between different groups of workers at the airport. There's nothing sinister about it. It's called solidarity."

Of course, this hasn't stopped the bourgeois media from dropping plenty of hints that there is some kind of "family" reason for the secondary action. The racism at work here is truly stupefying - militant strike action is painted as a foreign custom practised by immigrants that have failed to adopt the British Way Of Life...