28 January

"As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people. You cannot confront a power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do." Join a union, people. Join two, I have. That's the 'professional network' for all of us non-billionaires. The only thing these people are frightened of is organised and sustained resistance, they smile at protest, they see it as like farting into the wind. But they fear unions, this article describes again how hard they fight to destroy unions. That tells you all you need to know.