It's back to the workhouse

It's becoming increasingly evident that the right wing has got the taste of blood in its mouth and is determined to ram home its advantage.

A reactionary, muddled coalition led by a Tory wolf in sheep's clothing and fleshed out by a pack of Lib Dem nonentities pirouetting gracelessly round the Tory alpha male is, the Taxpayers' Alliance senses rightly, vulnerable to its brand of right-wing nonsense.

And so it has launched a campaign to set this mangy pack on the trade union movement, a campaign based in misrepresentations of the truth so extreme that even many Tory councils won't accept its arguments.

Lumping together money allocated by law to trade union use - funds supplied by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills through the Union Learning Fund and the Union Modernisation Fund - with wildly inaccurate estimates of paid staff time for union duties, this tatty collection of failed Tory politicians and right libertarian free marketeers has the public-sector unions squarely in its sights.

And what is it targeting? Why it's the time spent in coming to agreement with the employers over a huge range of issues. To quote GMB official Brian Strutton: "Reports have shown that union reps save employers money by improving the workplace and encouraging workers to improve skills.

"Health and safety reps save £371 million per year. Union learning reps take 250,000 workers through skills training and the economy benefits by an estimated £3 billion to £10 billion thanks to their positive role."

But, of course, such arguments don't impress the Taxpayers' Alliance. They wouldn't. It's fair to say that this alliance only exists to keep up pressure to cut taxation and to hell with the consequences.

It's a curiously 18th-century attitude. What would workers want or need with education? Why should they negotiate with employers anyway?

Why don't they know their place and keep to it?

No-one's had the sheer temerity to raise arguments like that for a century or more, but give the vampires of the right the chance and they will all rise up from their dusty old coffins, disinterring with them a set of attitudes that would shame the cotton masters and mill owners of the 19th century.

They dress it up in new jargon, of course, but in reality it's the same turgid old rubbish.

The Alliance represents nobody except itself and any resemblance between it and a 21st-century organisation is purely accidental.

But the danger is that, with this aimless and pointless coalition desperate to cut, cut and cut again, Alliance arguments could have a superficial attractiveness to Lib Dem cutters, plus ringing some historic bells with their Tory masters.

After all, it would constitute a direct attack on trade union rights and what could be a better rallying point to reunite the modern brand of Tory with their crusty old imperialist forebears, who are still deeply suspicious of young Cameron and his oiks?

Pair an attack on trade union rights with George Osborne's reported reconsideration of bank pay disclosures, couple that deadly pair with a clampdown on housing benefit which will cost 200,000 benefit claimants up to £500 a year each, double with more job cuts for lower-paid bank workers and redouble with VAT rising to 20 per cent to avoid hitting the rich with a higher tax rate and what have you got?

It's a full house of high Tory cards which would delight even Margaret Thatcher - and it's being delivered courtesy of a truckload of Tories who couldn't even win a majority against a three-term government, plus their Lib Dem toadies and hangers-on.

Next week's TUC congress had better take heed of what's ranged against us and act on it or, before we know it, it's back to the workhouse for the lot of us.