The worst wreckers of Birmingham? The judges
'Mass picketing is back. The trade union movement has shown it is at its most powerful when it acts together. Workers supporting workers,' said Henry Fowler, co-founder of the Strike Map Group, which organised the 'Five sites, one day' picket involving 26 organisations from across the trade union movement, including the RMT, ASLEF, NEU, NASUWT, and the BMA.
The strike is, of course, being supported by Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and now leader of a new hard-Left party that has yet to be named. Last week he was in Birmingham to address protesters outside Atlas Depot in Tyseley, where the gates were shut due to the demonstration.
There are so many villains in the tale of how Birmingham, second city of the Empire, became such an eyesore and modern embarrassment to the country.
The strike by refuse workers is in its fifth month and has resulted in a plague of rats and maggots across the city as an estimated 17,000 tons of domestic waste go uncollected. So the trade union Unite and its members must take at least some responsibility.
Then there is the city council itself, whose incompetent handling of Birmingham's finances – an example of which was last year's revelation that it wasted £90m on a botched IT system – has been painful to watch.
And then of course there is the UK Labour government which is only too keen to blame everything that's going wrong in Birmingham, not on the city's own leadership and certainly not on those hard-working Unite members who also happen to contribute part of their salaries to the Labour Party, but to '14 years of Tory austerity'.
But the main culprit in all of this, the central villain, is none other than our misinformed and meddling judges. The reason the council has been left with a potential £760m liability, which it is now striving to manage with unpopular changes to refuse collectors' staffing and conditions, is that the courts made an absurd ruling last year that the jobs of teaching assistant, cleaner and bin collector are all 'similar'. And according to Britain's employment law, work done by men and women in 'similar' posts cannot be paid different salaries. The problem is that teaching assistants and cleaners tend to be women and refuse collectors men, and historically, the men who emptied the bins were paid more.
Perhaps if a judge were to consider which of those jobs was the most unpleasant, which one he or she would rather not do if they found themselves turfed off the bench tomorrow, then they might have drawn a different conclusion. Unpleasant though essential jobs tend to come with higher financial compensation in order to attract enough recruits. How any judge can conclude that refuse collection and teaching assistance are similar is a mystery that may remain unsolved.
The legal ramifications, however, are much clearer than their honours' logic and the only way the council can make ends meet is to start cutting costs. And that includes its budget for refuse collection.
With so many culprits responsible for the national embarrassment that has consumed Birmingham, it should be no surprise that none of them is actually willing to take any blame whatsoever.
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