Why are the people fighting among themselves?

Here’s a question: If someone was bashing your neighbour around the head with a stick would you

a) join in

b) help him to fight off the attacker?

I ask because it appears that in many Western economies large numbers of people are opting to join in. Here we all are mired in a desperate economic situation wrought for the most part by the banks and investment houses (and paid for by the general populace), and yet the main gripe most people seem to have is with what workers in the public sector are getting. In Ireland, for example, there appears to be a particular relish in people working in the private sector who have taken pay cuts or lost their jobs in calling for their counterparts in the public sector to pay up for the misdeeds of the banks and property developers. In the UK George Osborne has proposed a pay freeze for the vast majority of public sector workers.

There’s something patently ludicrous about people who have suffered so much during the current economic disaster doing their utmost to drag their public sector colleagues into the hole they find themselves in when what they should be doing is joining forces and holding the politicians and bankers to account for the reckless behaviour which put them there in the first place. It’s almost as if they would get more satisfaction from seeing ordinary people like themselves suffer than do anything to hold the people at the top to account.

It really is something when the debate is framed in terms of public sector employees giving up the good things they have – better terms and conditions, pensions, holidays and union protection – in favour of the same rubbish conditions, worthless pensions and job insecurity that people in the private sector have found themselves foisted with. Surely the two groups should be making common cause to improve the terms and conditions, job security and pensions of all workers?