Why he was wrong to say the strike was wrong

A response to Paul Richards.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Ed really shouldn’t go out of his way to annoy his core support. A lack of support is one thing declarations of ‘wrongness’ quite another.
“Parents know the value of day’s education”. Oh puh-lease! Was Ed complaining about the royal wedding interrupting GCSE and GCE preparation or did he accept the invitation? Sanctimonious double standards, frankly.
Ah yes the British public! Well I can see how nobody who aspires to be PM wants to be on the wrong side of public opinion but surely he could try and shape public opinion from time to time rather than just follow it? The logical conclusion of this strategy is to let MORI write the manifesto.
Public support isn’t that much against the strikers 40:49 – according to The Sun of all papers!
The claim that Ed will not be able to guarantee public sector pensions is just wrong. Public sector pensions are affordable. Their cost as a proportion of GDP is set to fall – as Hutton shows. The argument is about fairness. Cameron’s way of resolving the disparity is to make public sector pensions worse – another possibility is to find a way of making private sector pensions better.
Maybe if secondary action was made legal again we could have more marches rallies and speeches in favour of sacked retail workers. Would Ed want that?  Maybe he could have made a few speeches about them. I didn’t hear any last week. In fact given that no Labour leaders ever support strikes I would have been quite happy if Ed had not made any speeches this week in favour of public sector workers and concentrated on unemployed retail workers instead. But he didn’t, did he?

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