Back to the eighteenth century.

“In the trial of persons accused for crimes against the state, the method is much more short and commendable: the judge first sends to sound the disposition of those in power, after which he can easily hang or save a criminal, strictly preserving all due forms of law,” reported Gulliver to his Houyhnhnm  master as part of his description of  the English  legal system in the early 18th century. 

  Things don’t appear to have changed much. In the preamble to his interview with Unite's joint-General Secretary Derek Simpson, John Humphrys suggested that under Thatcher the politicians had taken the initiative in clipping the Trades Unions’ powers, now it was business undertaking that task. As though there were a distinction. If the Whigs were the political arm of business in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Tories have long since taken over that role. With the advent of Blairism the Labour Party ceased to be the political wing of the Trades Unions and the necessary counterbalance to the employers’ power was lost. For all practical purposes the state and business  are the same, or more accurately the state is the local embodiment of international business. 

  In March 1933 a coalition government took power in Germany. On May 3rd the unions were dissolved and their leaders arrested.  The German Labour  Front was set up to replace it. Its leader declared: ‘… I  know the exploitation of anonymous capitalism ,… we will build up the protection and the rights of the workers still further.’ Within three weeks a law was introduced to end collective bargaining and, in effect, to outlaw strikes. Our coalition government is more subtle in its approach - the BA strike has been grounded on a technicality - but  the effect  is the same.  Derek Simpson eloquently spells out its absurdity in the link in the previous paragraph.