Not Quite The Lion's Share

Today's image was taken on another local photographic safari. This is one of the stone lions at the entrance to Preston Hall, just around the corner from my house. I have used the lions (actually there's a lion and a lioness) as blip subjects before but I particularly liked this angle as he was surrounded by flowering acanthus and it appears as though he's not too pleased about it either!

My brother was unable to get into work for a couple of days last week due to the train strikes and whilst I understand the disruption and inconvenience has caused upset and in some cases anger I do sympathise with the strikers' cause.
 I read a great comment piece in The Observer about this subject by Kenan Malik entitled "Enemy within? Hardly...most people see why we need unions prepared to strike." I have included part of the article below:

The Tories love the working class. So long as workers can help them win red wall seats. So long as they can paint them as “socially conservative” and use them as alibis for legislation hostile to immigrants or welfare claimants. So long as they can exploit them as props for a fantasy levelling up agenda.
But the moment workers take matters into their own hands, assert their collective voice and take action to preserve wages and conditions, they are denounced as militants and the enemy within; even, ludicrously, as “Putin’s friend”, as Tory MP Tobias Elwood claimed about RMT strikers. Tories like the idea of the working class in the abstract, as individuals who might vote for them every five years, but not the working class in the flesh, as people who act collectively to defend their rights.

Critics of the RMT, in the government and beyond, have attempted to portray strikes as an immoral weapon wielded by uncaring union bosses to “hold the country to ransom”. In fact, strikes are weapons of the powerless, not the powerful, a means of restoring a modicum of balance in a highly unequal relationship between employers and workers.

Strikes are weapons of the powerless, not the powerful

Corporations have myriad ways of imposing their power on employees: cutting wages, enforcing redundancies, tearing up contracts, withdrawing investment. When companies threaten to close down plants if their redundancy or wage cut plans are not accepted, or to move investment elsewhere if they don’t receive sufficient sweeteners, few call it “holding the country to ransom”. But that’s exactly what it is – and with far more leverage than unions could ever muster.
The main deterrent workers collectively possess in response to the power of employers is the withdrawal of their labour. No one takes strike action lightly – after all, workers lose money by going on strike. But sometimes it is a weapon they have to wield.

Membership of unions may have plummeted but they can play a role in making Britain fairer.