LONDON: Last week was the 20th anniversary of the Wapping dispute and, although the Eighties weren’t so long ago, the pictures of pickets taking on a management which had outmanoeuvred them feel as if they’re from another age. After the collapse of robust trade unionism, employees don’t fight in the streets any more but in the courts, the last arena where they can meet business on equal terms. Across the developed world, many powerful people don’t like them fighting at all and are trying to load the law against them.

Throughout his career, George W Bush has campaigned for ‘tort reform’, a euphemism for making it harder for the sick and put-upon to claim damages. Britain is going the same way. In the Eighties, business persuaded the Thatcher government to make it ever more difficult for employees to strike. Mission accomplished, it is now pushing the Blair government to make it ever more difficult for employees to sue.

Ministers held the latest in a series of meetings last Friday about how to tackle ‘the compensation culture’. Much of their discussion may well have been sensible; we already know they want to get ambulance-chasing solicitors out of hospitals and allow teachers to take pupils on school trips without brokering a deal at Lloyds.

But the real pressure ministers are bending before doesn’t come from schools and hospitals but from the insurance industry which wants to stop claims for compensation for personal injuries at work reaching the courts. The strange thing is that it can’t produce a shred of evidence to support its allegation that American-style sharp practice is rife in Britain.

Check out the stories about grasping workers milking the system that take up so much space in the media and nine times out of 10 you will find they’re tosh. For instance, there was a fuss last month about Gavin Bassie, a fireman who was invalided out of the service after slipping on a dusty floor during a PE session.

The Merseyside Fire Authority had to pay £100,000 in compensation for his badly torn knee ligaments and a similar amount in costs. After the hearing, managers said the spectre of litigation was now so chilling it had forced them to ban officers from running in fitness classes.—Dawn/The Observer News Service