Roll Up, Roll Up! Victimhood Cage Match..! Free Admission!

Over at the Social Care Experts Blog, one of the few postings to garner any comments at all was one provocatively titled 'My Problem With Trade Unions'. This had a massive seven replies so I had a look. It's written by one Simon Stevens, who describes himself as 'an independent disability trainer and consultant':

One of the interesting things to come out of personalisation is that suddenly trade unions have pricked up their ears and want a piece of the action after failing to recognise personal assistants for the past few decades.

Now the revolution is upon us, they are realising, like social workers and care providers, that their power base is also under threat from this new thing called a service user. My opinion of trade unions is somewhat low as all I see is national strikes deliberately causing pain and suffering to the public for political point-scoring and overpaid union fatcats shouting the odds at how men should have the divine right to work down a mine, be paid in gold, have 60 weeks' holiday a year and have their feet licked by the evil Victorian mill owners who apparently run the country!

Ouch! Light the blue touch paper...

He goes on:

I strongly believe that if my staff were forced to join a trade union, I would be better off dead.

This last comment is a little odd, because over on his personal blog, he has a post entitled '74 Ways of upsetting a disabled person', where no 3 is 'Tell a disabled person they are better off dead'.

Ooopsie! That's something he castigates the 'normals'* for...

The responses from TU reps are pretty amusing, needless to say. A rather excellent 'blue on blue' incident...

* 'Normals' are non-disabled people. Such sensitivity...