Events came to a head on the night of November 29 1983 when a mob of 4,000 pickets set fire to buildings and repeatedly rammed the gates of the plant. Shah, trapped inside, feared for his life – and was eventually rescued by robust police action of the kind that would become familiar during the miners’ strike a year later.
Meanwhile, his house was fire-bombed several times and a set of five coffins was delivered, the smaller ones evidently a threat aimed at his three children. When his wife Jennifer (who was suffering from cancer) rang to tell Shah this news, he said: “Maybe it’s time to give up,” to which she replied: “If you do, I’m leaving you.”
Now, Angela, your verdict on the people who are supposed to stand up for the capitalists was, err, “Scum”. As opposed to the nice kind socialist union leaders?
Behind every great (?) man stands a great woman…
Or a great Brasilian beach boy?
Or five Eastern European “male models”.
The satisfying part of the whole affair was how word processors made the nasty belligerent typsetters obsolete overnight. That is why many people daydream about automating the railways and doing the same to the rather militant rail unions. Your fellow blogger Longrider, who knows a lot about how railways operate, assures us that it is impossible given current technology. I presume that if you were building a new network from scratch it could be done but adapting the remaining parts of a Victorian rail network not so straightforward.
The first thing to do with railways is to end the billions in subsidy that goes to them, and goes on building stupid new lines and all these rural trains that barely anyone uses. Either people going from Westbury to Chippenham can foot the bill, or they can take a bus and we shut them down. Or maybe the RMT and ASLEF take a pay cut to make it add up.
Dr Beeching (pbuh) correctly advised replacing the train services with buses. Cheaper to run, suited small numbers of passengers. And that was 60 years ago, when buses, coaches and cars weren’t as good as they are now. If you did the same exercise today, you’d shut down over half the network. That train that Boris and Shapps reopened in Dartmoor carries, on average, 40 passengers per train. That’s a coach. Beeching was, it turned out, right.
Then, you start screwing ASLEF and the RMT. Freeze pay. When they strike, flick the Vs. Tell them to KEEP FUCKING GOING. Businesses can remote work longer than these fuckers can go without getting paid. The insane pay was because they could hold London to ransom, and well, they can’t now. We have remote work for most jobs in London. It needs a full-on, balls-out Thatcher action.
And privatise it. Properly this time. Not some fucking franchise crap. Sell off the whole lot. Have greedpig shareholders driving efficiency. Close the ticket offices rather than pussying out like the Tories did.
Dr. Beeching also provided me with somewhere to ride my bike. I commuted along the Hull to Hornsea line for quite a few years.
We have remote work for most jobs in London.
Where the hell do people get these ideas? How disconnected from reality do you have to be? The majority of people working in London do some sort of hands on, manual work. Who do they think serves in shops & restaurants etc, let alone all the other services? Of the desk jockeys, most need to be in their place of work to interact with the other parts of the enterprise they’re working in. Remote work is done by a small but vociferous & endlessly heard from minority. No doubt to preserve their ability to skive.
Fair point. What I should have said is people commuting by train into London.
So at best, you’re talking about the numbers of people London’s main line terminuses managed to process through between say 8 & 9 AM weekdays. Few hundred thousand?
How many of those have opted for & allowed to adopt home working? The number’s going to be fairly trivial but no doubt felt in particular areas of the city. London isn’t just the single digit post codes.
Covid proved that most of them could do it.
And it’s why post-Covid rail strikes have targeted things like Glastonbury weekend rather than weekdays. They know everyone can work around them.
“Of the desk jockeys, most need to be in their place of work to interact with the other parts of the enterprise they’re working in.”
This is utterly wrong. most desk jockeys are either pushing paper from one side of their desk to the other, or writing code.
For either one, you can do it remotely.
I guess sales works better in person. Though there’s a lot of overhead in that.
If it can all be done remotely, why do companies insist on maintaining large expensive office properties and are enforcing attendance in such properties? They know that WFH reduces output. It might suit a few autistic types but for most people it is a skive.
The insane pay was because they could hold London to ransom, and well, they can’t now.
It wasn’t just London. A lot of their pay rises and perks came from holding the country to ransom when coal was transferred from mines to electricity generating plants. As soon as the miners settled their strikes ASLEF would step in and demand big pay rises.
“Businesses can remote work longer than these fuckers can go without getting paid. The insane pay was because they could hold London to ransom, and well, they can’t now. We have remote work for most jobs in London. It needs a full-on, balls-out Thatcher action.”
This is a major reason why the CEO class is declaring return to office policies. Not because it makes sense for the business, but because it’s in the interest of their government and union buddies to keep commuters commuting.
I don’t believe this is happening much. The media are talking it up.
If there was lots of return to the office, season ticket sales, entries at London stations and London house prices would all be increasing significantly.
People forget just how violent the Left have been over the last…well, forever. It’s always the Establishment spluttering: ” …but what about the Far-Right!”.
The Left are violent when it suits them. I’m so old I can remember learning that in the first two or three general elections after The War one of the standard things to ask a Labour canvasser was “What did you do in the war?”
The point was that although plenty of Labour voters went to war, lots of their apparatchiks had cowered in civil service or trade union jobs. They found the idea of violence less appealing when it was a two-way affair.
There was none of that ‘Eddy Shah (real name Selim Jehan Shah)’ with him.
I always thought he really was named Eddy Shah.
From her Times obit (she beat the cancer, too, dying in 2023 after a ‘long illness’):
Jennifer Farquharson White was born in 1943 in Cardiff. Her acting debut came at 15 in the television drama And Then There Were None and her first appearance on the big screen in Jack the Ripper (1959).
Her other film credits, for which she was billed as Jenny White, were mostly in supporting roles, included playing a photographer’s model in the 1964 spy thriller Night Train to Paris and a nurse alongside Barbara Windsor in Carry On Doctor (1967). She appeared in the 1969 American romantic comedy If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium with Suzanne Pleshette and Ian McShane and, in addition to playing Caligula’s sister, notable television appearances included The Wind in a Tall Paper Chimney with Donald Sinden and Bernard Cribbins, The Murder Game and episodes of The Avengers.
She also worked as a model and as a BBC presenter and could lay claim to having been a Bond girl. True, it was only a small part in 1967’s Casino Royale, a spoof in which David Niven played the original “Sir James Bond” supported by a stellar cast that included Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Deborah Kerr and Woody Allen. Yet when the film was reissued several decades later on DVD, it was White who was chosen to appear alongside Niven and Andress on its cover.
I just don’t understand The Left. “His business refuses to employ us so we’ll kill him that will force him to employ us…….. err……”