In over 15 years in state education in this country, I’ve encountered enough bad teachers to know they don’t deserve the time of day. In fact, I was suspended from secondary school for having the temerity to suggest that one be given her P45. That’s the sort of gratitude I get for saving them all that money on HR consultancy fees…

And so it’s nice to hear that the government is finally taking my advice and kicking out the lazy socialist bums that congregate in the nation’s school staff rooms. Well, at least an adviser is now advising the same. Sir Cyril Taylor, chair of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, has said:

We’ve got 400,000 of our children attending low-attaining schools; 75,000 leave schools at 16 with hardly any qualifications at all; five million adults are functionally illiterate. That’s a serious problem.

Clearly. I don’t think it’s that major a problem that people leave school without being able to analyse Shakespeare’s sonnets, but reading is slightly more important.

The head teacher that is good can take the necessary action; you get the wrong people off the bus and get the right people on the bus in the right seats.

Get off the bus and on your bike? I likesies. But the lefties are, quite predictably, angry. After all, the fewer socialist bums there are picking up taxpayers’ money, the… fewer socialist bums there are picking up taxpayers’ money. Good old self-interest.

But the main point of ROFLMAOing as far has to be the head of the NUT, John Bangs, who said:

I cannot understand where he’s got those figures from. We have the best teaching force we’ve had for years and years.

If anyone in the country thinks state sector teachers are better today than they were a generation ago - achieving worse standardised results with vastly more money and better technology - they’re kidding themselves. If anyone overseas looks over at the UK and envies our teachers - who can’t control a class or teach the most docile of grammar school students - they have similarly poor judgment.

The fact is that the introduction of a stick by which to beat bad teachers around the head can only be a good thing. A carrot, in the form of truly performance-related pay, would be a nice addition, but striking the fear of God into teachers with a massive stick with spikes in sounds like more fun.

For, you see, children, that’s called incentivisation. It’s what makes the free market so damn good: rewarding productivity and success and not rewarding inefficiency and failure. I know, the lefties will tear this policy apart with their fearsome argument of reductio ad capitalisum. But it’s true, and the opposite system, of teachers being rewarded for failing to teach 16-year olds to read, sounds a trifle absurd.

So, there you go. Unions prefer state schools remaining inefficient bastions of tenured teachers, depressing teaching quality and hindering the advancement of those pupils that the state forces to attend such inferior schools that they see fit for the taxpayer to fund. Sadly, unlike his heroine Baroness Thatcher, Gordon Brown hasn’t got the best track record of standing up to public sector trade unions, so you can bet your bottom dollar that he’ll pay no attention whatsoever to Sir Cyril. The result can only be 17,000 useless teachers, and 400,000 betrayed pupils.

Sometimes, you can feel it in your bones. Sometimes, one just knows that one’s in for a tough time ahead. But Londonders don’t have to feel their bones (as appealling as Brandon Flowers makes that sound) to know that the next week isn’t going to be a good one.

That’s because, as of six o’clock tonight, the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers [sic. throughout] (RMT) is forcing its members to go out on strike, bringing the London Underground, and therefore London above ground too, crashing to a halt. The RMT is renowned as one of the last unreformed communist labour cartels (popularly known as ‘trade unions’, but only insofar as OPEC is an ‘oil union’). It’s so unreformed that its leader, Bob Crow, left Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party because it was too right-wing.

The workers’ employer, Metronet, is responsible for maintaining and renovating most of the capital’s Tube lines. The same company is now in administration, having lost hundreds of millions complying with new regulations (although, it must be said, Tube Lines achieved the impossible by meeting all their targets and turning a profit). The workers have decided that the best way to improve their small corner of the world is to breach their contracts and withdraw their labour, forcing their insolvent employer to keep on as much labour as possible. One problem with that: they’re insolvent.

So that proves that the strike isn’t about ‘worker-management relations’, because there’s no management worth having relations with. Ken Livingstone is now expropriating Metronet, and it’s him - a fellow socialist - that the RMT wants to hurt. Ken being a politician, the only way they can hurt him is through the ballot box. The point of the strike is to hurt normal Londoners, in the hope that we will use the democratic process to do their bidding. It’s all about worker-voter relations.

I for one reject the false logic and false gods of communism. This absurd situation is brought about by the carte blanche that the most odious man in Britain has to rule, and ride rough-shod, over a city of seven million people. If we didn’t have a government that insisted that it’s its responsibility to expropriate private property to maintain employment, we wouldn’t have labour cartels walking out and inflicting punishment on us, the individuals.

The solution is, simply, to do as the RMT says, and punish Ken Livingstone. So long as Ken’s in charge, we have a city government that allows the insidious and insufferable Crow to hold as hostage. We need a government that doesn’t bend to the demands of special interests, and that requires one that doesn’t bend to the demands of the electorate.

I’m not suggesting that we have a government that acts counter to the interests of the population, but, rather, one that can’t act for the population on matters on which the population can act itself. That requires restrictions, both political and constitutional, on the power of government. The principle of Auguste Chomel (and not Hippocrates, but I digress), ‘first, do no harm’ holds here; the only way we can stop the government encouraging the sort of behaviour that is forcing our city to its knees is to stop government encouraging any sort of behaviour at all.