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First and foremost this week, don’t forget to get yourselves to Sterts Theatre (www.sterts.co.uk) to see Simon Parker’s new play Third Light, about the only Cornish community to have all its soldiers return home from the First World War. Dance, music and a cast drawn from the local community – it promises much.

Now then, to business: This week, you will once more be ordered to complain about the unnecessary inconvenience visited upon you by those awful trade unions.

On Thursday, television news will obediently screen a clip of an enraged parent complaining loudly about the nuisance of having to look after his or her own children for a day because of those communist teachers. And newspapers owned by multi-millionaires who’ve sacked tens of thousands while driving a once-proud industry into a situation where it no longer even covers local democracy will instruct you to be outraged at the workshy lefties.

Well, brothers and sisters, we are not going to do as we are told, are we? No. We are going to support and celebrate the hundreds of thousands who, on Thursday, have the courage to take direct action to demand a fairer society. We are going to be grateful that we live in a nation that enables the less powered to give peaceful, democratic voice to their frustrations.

Every single one of the people who walks out on Thursday is following in a proud and noble tradition of people who, confronted by injustice, decided not to do what they’re told and campaigned peacefully for better solutions.

Every single one of these activists believes so passionately that this country should share its money more equally that they are sacrificing their own income to make a point. You’ll be told how much the strike has cost the country, as ever. But nobody will tell you how much the strike has saved the country. They’re giving up a day’s wages. (Wonder if you’ll get a rebate on your taxes, eh?).

Every single one of these strikers is walking in the footsteps of the people who won, for you, your pay, your holidays, your pensions, your health care, your education, even your weekends.

But everything’s fine now, isn’t it? Isn’t it? There’s no need for strikes any more, is there? All that hardship is in the past, isn’t it?

In depression Britain, my grandfather used to walk to the doors of the dockyard each day and hope to be chosen for work so he could earn something to use to feed his children. If he wasn’t chosen, he got nothing and the kids went hungry.

Today, people on zero hours contracts wait to be summoned to work at whatever time and place suits the employer so they can earn money to feed their children, rather than join the growing queues at the food banks.

Trade unions stopped my grandfather’s daily humiliation, his daily mental agony. This government is blithely taking us back to the situation where the wealthy can summon the poor when they need them and disdain all responsibility for the community when they do not. Everything isn’t fine now.

But if people still doubt, well, brothers and sisters, invite everybody you know to try to find out why the people are striking. They won’t find the reasons on television or in the newspapers, of course, but social media and the internet are wonderful tools for the liberating circulation of truths. But let me help you. Teachers, for example.

On strike are teachers who know that working more than 65 hours a week to satisfy an education bureaucracy led by a right-wing politician and his telephone-selling friend, rather than by people who know anything about children or education, does not offer our children the best they can get. Teachers who know that filling in forms is a less productive use of their time than teaching children. Teachers who know that opening the doors of academy schools to fast-food sponsorship does not offer the healthiest option for our children. Teachers who know that enabling free schools to appoint unqualified, unregulated staff does not offer the safest environment for our children. Teachers who understand that performance related pay incentivises target-meeting, not child-teaching. Teachers who understand that pupils will not learn best from ageing, exhausted, out-of-touch teachers who have to work until they’re nearly 70 because the politicians and the economists have loused up the economy.

Perhaps people will repeat to you the media’s order to view the strikes as the act of a tiny minority of ideologically fixated militants?

You could, then, point out to them that with 6.5 million members, trade unions are the single largest democratic movement in this country. They have more than nine times the membership of the three leading political parties put together. You could point out to them that trade union ballots have roughly similar turnouts to elections, and that the Conservative Party got less of a share of the vote in the last general elections than, for example, the ‘yes’ vote in the NUT’s latest ballot for strike action.

Perhaps you will yet again be required to believe that it’s lazy public sector workers who already have a great deal better pay and conditions than their private sector counterparts who are greedily demanding more.

Perhaps you could point out that a quarter of public sector workers are on the minimum wage, the lowness of which drives them to claim housing benefit to pay the exorbitant rent demanded by private landlords. You could also say that people on strike want decent pay and conditions for everybody, not just public sector workers, and reflect on the central question of this argument: do we want all employees to earn less or be on zero hours contracts, like obedient but hard-up non-union private sector workers, or do we want all employees to have decent terms and conditions?

You may well be asked to reflect that strong trade unions create a weak economy, and people will once again expect you to ‘remember the 70s’, that decade of ever-increasing wealth and opportunity for the vast majority of Britons in which the wealthy were required to improve the reward of the people who created their wealth. My, they didn’t like that. Many of them were newspaper owners, of course. Like Rupert Murdoch. He doesn’t like his pockets being dipped into. In fact, he’s going to ask us, the taxpayer, to pay him back the money with which he funded the defence of Rebekah Brooks. Hmm. Whose side are you on, eh?

How about that banal old contextless argument that strong trade unions create a weak economy? Well, who of us would want the quality of life the Germans have, eh? Or the Swedes? The Italians? The French? They’re so much worse off than us, aren’t they? They don’t have strong trade unions in America, do they, and look how fair and decent their society is, there’s hardly any poverty or racism or need or bigotry or violence or…….  

How about reflecting on the damage caused to our economy when pay and conditions for working people stopped improving? Less tax income, more reliance on benefit (and don’t forget the vast majority of benefit claimants are working people), more debt, more food banks, more hardship, more costly health problems for the NHS to pick up.

But this is all very long-winded. People who just do as they are instructed by the television and newspapers are, by that very definition, hard of thinking, so perhaps we should make it simple for the simple.

People striking – teachers, cleaners, firefighters, for example – are asking for better lives for people who work for a living, funded by a more equal distribution of the nation’s assets.

People who are against the strikers – millionaire business owners like Rupert Murdoch, Tory politicians, bankers, for example – don’t want more of the nation’s assets to go to people who work for a living.

Sometimes, it really is as simple as that. Whose side are you on?

Eyes on the prize

A society improved by the politicians, eh? Try telling that to Brother Fiddle, referred on June 12^th for an ‘urgent’ appointment because of suspected glaucoma, and offered a date on September 30^th. That’s progress, isn’t it? And you can bet your bottom dollar – I know this from personal experience with my father – that whoever’s seeing Brother Fiddle in September will be able to see him next week if the Brother coughs up a few hundred quid for a private appointment. That’s a world worth fighting for, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, my broadband is barely moving this morning. Christ. A land of business opportunity for all, eh? Try telling that to the multi-billion-pound-profit-generating privatised monopoly BT Open Reach, responsible for providing a modern efficient communications network to everybody.

Living with guilt?

Last week after bathtime I fetched the nail scissors and set to trimming my seven-year-old’s fingernails. I slipped and stabbed him in the forefinger, drawing blood. Poor Tom cried. I felt terrible: he’d trusted me and I’d let him down. The feeling of guilt and failure was awful. Imagine multiplying that by a hundred trillion-fold? How can an abuser of children even carry on living?