Have you noticed just how many services and facilities just shut down the minute their managers saw snow falling from the sky?

I just walked a quarter of a mile, through a couple of centimetres of snow, to pick up my post. I saw the buses and the trains getting around. I saw plenty of people moving around, getting on with their lives and work. I saw street cleaners, diverted to grit-sprinkling and path clearing for the day but – clearly, they managed to get to work and get on with it.

Our Post Office

I got to the business centre I’m based in, asked for my post – nothing. The company now running what used to be our Post Office decided working in wintery weather is too hard, and just stopped. No deliveries at all today, and probably not tomorrow. Nothing has moved.

Remember the old Post Office attitude? The mail must get through – yes, late sometimes, yes, wet sometimes – but they didn’t just give up!

More importantly, remember what the bosses said, on the TV news, about their own staff, at the first hint of a whisper of industrial action?

Our Trains

Remember what the train companies said about their guards, who went on strike to preserve what they saw as essential, safe-working practices? – Remember what those bosses said about workers who stop trains running… and then those bosses got on with their own habit of cancelling trains whenever it suited them.

Our emergency Services

Remember what Jeremy Hunt said about doctors, nurses, teachers, fire-fighters – over-worked professionals at the end of their patience, remember what he said when these vocational, dedicated workers reluctantly, anxiously, considered industrial action?

Well, next time desperate workers talk about industrial action, and their bosses queue up to go on telly and call their staff irresponsible, lazy, troublemakers, just remind them what they did when providing the services we have all paid for looked a bit inconvenient to them.