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.

The Times reported today that a Polish university is opening a branch in Shepherd’s Bush, in west London. This is a marvellous development, allowing young Polish people to develop skills that will get them off the bottom of the wage ladder and encouraging them to settle down here. It is also another step forward in the emergence of a truly globalised education system.

However, I did also notice this, too:

The Academy of Humanities and Economics in Lodz [sic.] has about 20,000 students, many of whom study part-time.  It is one of about 300 private universities and was ranked 15th by Newsweek Poland last year.

300 private universities!? And that’s after just 15 years of them being legal. The United Kingdom has one. It just goes to show that, despite five decades of oppression at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviet Union, the Polish people’s individualism and entrepreneurism was only incubated, and has flourished since the fall of the Iron Curtain. If that’s the way Poles do it, we need more, not fewer, Poles over here.