To protest or not to protest

Some newspapers are  full of coverage today about the BBC strike, identifying those media personalities who had not, or had crossed the picket line.

Hats off to most of the Today team , some of the Ten o’oclock news presenters, and key figures of the Newsnight cast for refusing to go on air. Shame on those who didn’t and tried instead to keep us entertained, and their pay cheques coming in.

As  I tuned in and out of my car radio, it was at times difficult to make out who was in and who was out, such was the liberal use made by the BBC management of pre-recorded and repeat material. It made me  wonder what fuss, if any, was made by those journalists whose voices were used in such   a way. I suspect not much.  So shame on them too.

My real sympathies however are with the firefighters (or firemen as they were once were called). I remember many years ago the huge public sympathy generated by their lengthy industrial action. Money poured into the collection hats outside the stations. This time round their union leaders called off a threatened strike over Guy Fawkes weekend having judged, rightly, that their action not only might have risked lives but also wrecked one of  the few occasions of genuine , if indulgent, collective fun in the year.

There is still the prospect that firefighters  strike in the coming weeks, along with  other public sector employees. And good luck to them. They deserve a fair hearing and as much public sympathy as they can regenerate.Firefighters, like ambulancemen, and miners are society’s angels- they rescue life from the jaws of death.

And yet firefighters will struggle  to get the kind of comprehensive coverage the BBC strikers got. Journalists love writing about journalists. By contrast the days when  newspapers employed teams of  labour reporters to cover trade union affairs have long since gone.  It’s media celebrities not genuine workers that monopolise column inches, unless you happen to be  a Chilean miner, with newspaper editors themselves  seduced into thinking of themselves as celebrities. See my former boss Lionel Barber in today’s FT magazine, in pally conversation after playing a cricket a deux with Imran Khan.

Meanwhile the National  Union of Students is calling out its members next week to protest against the increase in fees.  It’s years since the educated youth of this country took to the streets over anything, still less showed a genuine interest in trying to change the world. I hope this is the beginning of a new passionate youthful engagement with politics and society.