Time to sort out disputes

Multiple unions, pursuing separate gripes with the Coalition Government, have chosen the same day to withhold their labour.

Today it was still not clear which services would be affected and how.

The unions' intention is to build awareness of their plight.

Dudley Council tells residents to put their bins out and hope for the best and if they are not emptied tomorrow, it could be Friday or even Monday before the backlog is dealt with.

Schools have sent out letters to parents because of a strike by one of the teaching unions. The public will wonder what it is they have done to deserve to be treated in this way. The people who suffer are not the ones who are responsible for the quarrel.

The Government will ride this out, just as it has done in previous strikes, and everyone will go back to work.

Unions make the very reasonable point that it was not council workers, teachers or civil servants that caused the financial crisis that sparked the austerity measures.

But neither was it the working parents who must make alternative, potentially costly, arrangements for child care or the people denied having their bin emptied.

Although strike action was backed by 82.5 per cent of National Union of Teachers members who voted, only 27 per cent actually did so.

The unions would argue that Police and Crime Commissioners were elected on a turnout of just 15 per cent. But in those elections every registered voter in the country had the choice. No-one else gets a say on whether or not the unions walk out.

The unions will need to build public sympathy for their causes. Giving detailed and advanced notice of exactly how services will be disrupted would be a good start. The firefighters have done this previously and swayed public opinion generally in their favour.

But previous strikes have also so far gone off without major incident thanks to well-advertised contingency plans.

The danger is that their argument could be drowned out in a general chorus of discontent.

The aim of the strike must be to get the Government and the unions around the table to discuss the matter further. The taxpayer does not deserve to play piggy in the middle. Both sides need to sort it out.

Crusade over tragic abuses

There was a sense of disbelief when Tom Watson stood up in Parliament nearly two years ago and alleged that there had been a powerful 'paedophile network' linked to Parliament and Number 10.

This week the MP for West Bromwich East can rightly feel a sense of achievement in the announcement of an all-encompassing inquiry into the establishment itself.

No stone will be left unturned in looking into state institutions, the BBC, churches and political parties to find out about historical child sex abuse.

Mr Watson has proved his mettle by taking on the Murdoch media empire and working to expose phone hacking. So it was perhaps inevitable that others with uncomfortable questions for the establishment would seek him out.

On this page today, he tells how hundreds of allegations and messages have been passed to the police as a result of people getting in touch with his office.

The country has been rocked to its core with the shocking scale of abuse by once revered figures like Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris. And now their victims no longer have to suffer in silence.