Watch out Cardiff...

Len McCluskey of the Unite Union has accused Iain Duncan Smith of being unable to shake of the 'vicious Tory determination to make the poor suffer' and said that 'It is clear that the Tory nasty party has never gone away'. The PCS union was equally aggressive, taking the obvious line by calling IDS a 'Tebbit clone'.

What did IDS do to deserve this attack? He suggested that people may not be being realistic if they waited for a job to become available in their home town: 'The truth is there are jobs. They may not absolutely be in the town you are living in. They may be in a neighbouring town... We need to recognise the jobs often don't come to you. Sometimes you need to go to the jobs.' Using Merthyr Tydfil as an example, he said people had become 'static' and that they 'didn't know if they got on a bus an hour's journey they'd be in Cardiff and they could look for a job there.'

McCluskey then pulled out my personal favourite comment: 'Cant the ConDem coalition really believe that the unemployment being created by savage government cuts will be fixed by having people wandering across the country with their meagre possessions crammed into the luggage racks of buses?'

You've got to love the unions. I mean, they're great when they're defending an individual teacher falsely accused by a student or a council employee hounded out by an overbearing chief executive, but they just lose the plot when it comes to national issues. The simple PR problem they have is that people switch off when they hear rhetoric like that. No-one really believes that there will be Indian-like bus trips with bundles of luggage falling from the roof down the M4 to Cardiff, it's just not credible...