Francis Maude

Francis Maude - He's One of Us

When entering into very serious negotiations, it is important to have the people on your side who you can trust, who know their background on the issues at stake and above all, who can earn an element of trust from your 'opponents'. These are things that I have learnt from politics and engineering, so let's have a look at the Government's leading negotiator in the current industrial dispute with the public sector unions, Francis Maude MP.

Francis was born in 1953 and is a son of a Tory MP, so it runs in the family. He attended the very exclusive Abingdon School for Boys in Oxfordshire and then onto Corpus Christi College Cambridge, like you do. He was a Councillor in the City of Westminster for 6 years (now you can't get more inner city than that) before being elected to Parliament, in the seat of North Warwickshire. It's fair to say then that does not exactly have a background in trade union disputes, but surely, that's what experienced Civil Servants are for.

Guess again.

It is rumoured from reliable sources (and I am happy to be corrected on this) that during the current negotiations, he queried why the unions were rushing to go on strike within a month of the ballot. He was blissfully unaware that the law his party had created, demanded it. He then went on to suggest that public sector workers should take only 15 minutes strike action on Wednesday, to make their point but not to cause any 'unnecessary disruption.' How quaint.

Needless to say, this doyen of the working class has not exactly struck it off with his fellow union negotiators.
Let me tell you more about Francis:-

• He claimed almost £35,000 in two years for mortgage interest payments (as an MP) on a London flat when he owned a house just a few hundred yards away (with a gym and 24-hour concierge, don't you know).
•  He was previously a managing director of Morgan Stanley, a director of Salomon Brothers and a non-executive director of Asda during the 1990s.
• He also has an interest in a residential investment property in France, according to the members’ register of interests.
• That means he has a total of four properties — two in London, one in France and one in his constituency of Horsham, West Sussex — in a property portfolio worth well over £1 million.

He has now decided that the unions have been so unreasonable in their demands for some concessions, that clearly the anti-trade union legislation in the UK (already the tightest in the western world) is far too slack and that there needs to be change to make it even harder to take strike action. This is of course, after the Government has yet to make a single concrete consession to the unions during the whole negotiation process, only a statement of changes 'in principle' if the unions called off their strike.

His statement in today's press was that 'wev'e been pretty bloody reasonable'. Well Francis, try telling that to a Council refuse worker facing a 50% increase in their pension payments, a longer working career and less to show for it on retirement, topped off with a 2 or 3 year pay freeze.

Maybe Francis has a point because after all, we are all in it together, aren't we?