Con-Dems are rapidly losing their grip

The chaotic and rambling drumbeat of the Tory march was laid bare for the questioning ears of the world once more when Home Secretary Theresa May MP denied that the new police and crime commissioners (PCCs) would lack a democratic mandate.

"I never set a turnout threshold for any election, and I'm not going to do it now," she told the BBC at the time.

This refreshingly pure belief in the democratic will of electoral participants flies in the face of the growing rag-tag band of right-wing chicken-hawks within Ms May's party who have been urging the Prime Minister to step up his relentless attacks on trade unions and the most vulnerable workers in society.

These upper-class warriors are raucously demanding that votes for industrial action on a turnout of less than 50 per cent be deemed unlawful, with the legal right to industrial action withdrawn under those circumstances.

For those of us campaigning against the constant rainstorm of hatred and prejudice thrown down upon the plebs by millionaire Tory MPs, this contradiction of policy comes as no surprise.

The PCCs are largely unwanted by taxpayers. I cannot see how the new system improves in any way upon the old one.

Under the Police Authority system, decisions were taken by democratically elected councillors.

They work in partnership with chief constables and have the power to hire and fire.

This is no different to PCCs except that a PCC earns around £70,000 a year without counting the pension - and, in so far as has been made clear by the woeful publicity campaign by the Home Office, will be working with less operational oversight than the current committee system.

The entire process has cost well in excess of £100 million and the electoral turnout - embarrassingly low everywhere - dropped at some polling booths to 0 per cent.

Compare this with the histrionic comments from Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson bemoaning the members of Aslef and RMT for voting democratically for industrial action over a wide range of issues on a much higher turnout than in the PCC election.

Workers who have to endure having their jobs threatened, their integrity questioned and who are on the receiving end of abuse - not just from understandably frustrated passengers but also from professional politicians who have never meaningfully worked in their lives and who quite frankly should know better.

Almost every time a union dares show the audacity to stand up to increasingly hawkish and aggressive employers it finds itself having to wade through a quagmire of judicial treacle, with high-paid barristers trying to persuade judges that the collective voice of train drivers, council workers, hospital cleaners or civil servants must be silenced due to a miniscule technical error, grammatical oversight or voter turnout not to the satisfaction of the offending company managers.

All these things happen with the explicit support of a Tory Party incandescent with rage at the failure of its beloved "free market" ideology and the inability of their hapless leadership to pass the burden of fiscal recovery onto the poor in its entirety.

Trade unions must seize upon the latest display of ideological duplicity by this rudderless government.

The Labour Party still seems to be running scared of the press on the issue of union activities. Despite the fact that the union movement is the "proud parent" of Labour the party our forefathers created treats us like an embarrassing uncle.

We have to turn the PCC elections into the ghost that haunts the Tories, and chases them into an embarrassed retreat down the oak-panelled halls of their country estates each and every time they dare to question the democratic rights of organised labour to take collective action.

I sincerely thank May for exposing her frayed ideologies and those of her pals.

If it is acceptable for another painfully beige political apparatchik to earn £70,000 making decisions affecting the public off the back of an electoral turnout of 5 per cent it is surely acceptable for organised workers to lose money off the back of taking the tough decision to withdraw their labour in a democratic vote of much higher proportions.

Those workers should not have to suffer the high-handed wrath of a misguided, ideologically septic and feckless governmental elite.

• Karl Davis is a train driver and trade union activist, having held a number of elected positions within the train drivers' union Aslef and the TUC.