Militant union leaders have been accused of losing their minds when one equated planned anti-strike legislation to Nazi Germany.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps reacted angrily when Mick Whelan, general secretary of railway drivers’ union Aslef, accused the government of returning the UK to the 1930s Germany, Spain, and Italy.
‘We are practically in what was occurring in Germany, Spain, and Italy in the mid-30s when you eliminated the right to strike, removed the right to demonstrate, removed the right to complain, you questioned attorneys, you intimidated union leaders,’ Mr Whelan said on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday. We are rapidly approaching a future that I do not believe we want to be in. Separately, RMT union president Mick Lynch told the New Statesman magazine that the EU has caused “conflict” in Ukraine and that “there were a lot of crooked politicians in Ukraine.”
‘And while they were doing that, an awful lot of people [in Ukraine] were toying with Nazi iconography and going back to the [Second World] war and all that,’ he said.
According to sources close to Mr Shapps, who is proposing to impose new regulations demanding minimum service levels during strikes, both men have ‘lost their minds.’
‘Between Mick Lynch’s selling of Kremlin misinformation and Mick Whelan’s ludicrous and disrespectful statements, the union mask has well and well fallen,’ said the Transport Secretary.