This is a long story which is serialised on this site. A new section is added every now and then.
It's a story about a far-off land with a Council that is cutting services, getting rid of Council housing, spending millions of pounds on private consultants and paying senior management huge salaries. Many members of staff are union members, but they get very little support in their local fight from the leaders of their union. That's because the leaders of these unions are desparate for good relationships with the political party that is destroying the country, because so many of those senior union members want to become MPs themselves. Wankers.
Prologue
Once upon a time – probably more often - there was a small, but central, nation that was, alas, ruled by an overblown, conscience-free political party that was entirely made up of takers, lechers, sadists, war-lovers, launderers, braggarts, daylight robbers, cons, felons, nepotists and traitors whose nature it was to join any queue for a raping. This party had sold itself to the people as an all-inclusive, representative Party of the People, and indeed was called the People's Party. Once in power, though, it headed briskly off on a very short journey to war, vice and perversion.
At the time of which we speak, this People's Party had ruled the nation for longer than its public cared to remember. It was also in power in a few local councils, where it had made, and continued to make, a monumental arse of itself.
It had, for instance, washed its hands of the important council job of providing council homes to the needy. It have given the management of many of these low-cost council homes to Arms Length Management Organisations, whose most memorable moves to date included declaring themselves bankrupt and sacking the hard-working frontline staff who helped their vulnerable clients find and maintain their much-required council homes.
At council level too, the People's Party had also closed local rehabilitation homes for troubled youths, refused to pay nursery nurses more than subsistence wages although they kept promising to, and allowed private companies to run homes for the vulnerable and aged for profit. The People's Party at council level had also apparently entered some sort of nationwide contest to sell every playground, berm and civic gathering-point to a massive supermarket enterprise and shonky luxury-apartment developers. It tried to raise its subjects' age for death from their thankless, poorly-paid efforts to keep public services afloat from 60 to 65. It paid private IT companies through the nose for an endless, and freakishly expensive, series of systems, database, web and networking balls-ups. The bigger the IT shambles made by a private company, the more money it received.
The nation's subjects were not wild about any of this. They were very keen to get shot of the People's Party at both the local and national levels. Unfortunately, the only real political alternative for the people of this nation was the Dark Party – a Party that was constituted entirely of congenital and career satanists. Nobody was in a huge rush to stir the scene up at that end, even if the Dark Party had recently choosen a comparatively young and decent-looking psychopath for once from its ranks as leader.
The upshot was that the nation's subjects decided to organise themselves and give the government and local councils a little taste of people-power. At the national level, they started to turn out at anti-war and anti-privatisation marches in long-unseen numbers. On the local level, they decided to join their local trade unions. This was particularly true among people who worked in the public services. The hope was that these local unions - which had, unfortunately, been haemorrhaging members, funds, influence and scruples for longer than was entirely flattering - would be thrilled to see their ranks swelling with honest, right-minded workers and would use their political connections and new-found membership heft to threaten the government and local councils with revolution if they continued to develop brutish policies that imperiled the poor and the employment conditions of the beleaguered public-sector rank and file.
Alas, this hope was built on sand. Far from leaping to the defence of their new and old members, the leaders of these reinvigorated trade unions showed an unfortunate inclination to slam the door in the faces of the poor and of the rank-and-file, and to whore around with People's Party politicians and rock stars and anybody else who was on the make. It was even worse than that, too. The union leaders not only demonstrated that they didn't give a bugger about helping the people that they were supposed to represent and whose membership fees paid their overblown salaries, but they actively launched a witch-hunting programme with a brief to get rid of any rank-and-file union member who tried to say that the People's Party and its love of war and privatisation was destroying people's lives. Suddenly, workplaces were infiltrated by moles from union headquarters who lept upon the slightest movement in the grass roots like randy ferrets.
Everbody knew why this was. Most of these unions paid money to the People's Party, and most union leaders liked the opportunities that these payments purchased. They particularly liked the thought that their toadying to the People's Party might lead to them one day being selected as People's Party candidates themselves. They viewed their union's annual payment to the party as the entry fee to this exclusive club. Many union presidents and well-placed union officials had been selected as People's Party election candidates over the years and many highly-placed union officials were keen for this tradition to continue, at least until their turn came. Any jumped-up serf or shop-floor pinko who looked like threatening this by bad-mouthing the People's Party was removed from the scene on a meathook.
And so it is that we turn now to one old, inner-city borough, where the People's Party had been in power at the local council for many years. This was also one of the boroughs where a lot of people were on the raw end of a two-pronged butt-fuck: the People's Party and their toadying unions were after them.
A local election also loomed at the time of which we speak. The People's party was desperate to win this election, because it felt, rightly, that a further caning in local elections (it had already had several very bad exepriences) would be interpreted as a comment on the extent to which it was loathed.
The council thus decided to instal a vicious senior management team and tell it to get rid of as many staff and services as possible, since they both cost money and caused trouble. The trade union - which was supposed to defend the staff who provided the public services that vulnerable people needed - went one better. It hired a bitter, right-wing, once-blonde, career slapper, and gave her free rein to take out her many life disappointments on any worker, activist, or free-speech proponent who looked even remotely likely cook up a revolution and bugger up the local elections for the People's Party at this particular council.
And so the pressure was on.
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