London's Tube Strike
Click here for all of David Frum's blogposts from the 2010 Conservative Party conference.
What better background music to a Conservative party conference than a strike on the London underground?
Today's 24-hour strike was more annoying than paralyzing. But the grievance behind the strike is so outrageous as to symbolize perfectly why Britain needed a change of direction.
The London subway employs some 10,000 people. System managers are planning over the next years to eliminate about 800 of those jobs, mostly ticket sellers, as technologically obsolete. Londoners now buy the overwhelming majority of their subway tickets from machines in the stations or online.
The Rail and Maritime Workers Union that represents blue-collar Tube workers has called strikes to protest the elimination of the obsolete jobs, two of them in the span of a single month. Only about 1400 people - fewer than half the actual membership of the relevant union membership - cast a strike vote. But since so many members did not vote at all, that 1400 was sufficient, at least from the point of the union leaders.
As for the point of view of Londoners? Mayor Boris Johnson summed that up well: Speaking at the conference this morning he called the strike a "nakedly political gesture" intended to affect the next city election. It likely will do so too, but in precisely the opposite way that the unions intended.