A regular brisk walkout keeps the heart healthy

Now that strikes are all the rage, it is time for sombre reflection, not on the iniquity of withdrawing labour and inconveniencing the public, but on the injustice of being left out. You and I, dear reader, could down tools, walk out, light a brazier and hoist a placard, and would passing motorists toot their support? Would anyone listen when we talked of our legitimate aspirations? Would anyone make us a derisory offer?

At times like this, to be a non-essential worker is to be deprived. We shall never know what it is to stand shoulder to shoulder on the picket line, a band of brothers facing a common foe. We who are not wanted can never taste the thrill of facing the camera crews, our breath freezing on the air, as we lament the regrettable necessity of making life hell for thousands of others and declare once again our willingness to get around the table and negotiate a full and final settlement.

If the world woke up tomorrow and there was no Last Word column, the world would not notice. It would carry on in its insouciant way, spinning around and no doubt whistling in a carefree manner. And what if marketing were to stop tomorrow? True, the wheels of commerce would grind less smoothly, but grind they would. If the brains behind fcuk, commonly acknowledged to be the apogee, the pinnacle, the towering achievement of late 20th-century marketing, beside which all previous creative endeavours are seen as mere preparations, were to walk out, would anyone but a few sad dyslexics in T-shirts complain?

But take heart. I bring news of an impending strike that may bring comfort to all of us supernumeraries, we who are swept hither and yon like so much flotsam and jetsam, powerless victims of the tides and currents of supply and demand.

Hundreds of government scientists are staging a 24-hour strike over pay parity with their colleagues at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Staff at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science plan to strike at their laboratories in Weymouth, Lowestoft and Burnham-on-Crouch.

Apart from wanting more money – who doesn’t? – these science militants are making a more important point. They are showing the world that industrial action is not just for workers who, for one reason or another, society values and needs; it is also for people about whom society gives not a toss. When the test tubes fall silent at Burnham-on-Crouch, no one will suffer; when the white lab coats are hung up at Lowestoft, they will not be taken down and worn for the day by hastily drafted-in members of the Honourable Artillery Company; when the picket line forms at Weymouth and little knots of aggrieved BScs huddle together, no one will be of a mind to run the gauntlet. No one will care.

Through their action, the scientists are showing us all that the joy of striking is not – as Mr Blair might say – for the few, but the many. It is a fundamental human right and an end in itself. It is time that we saw strikes, not as internecine acts of economic warfare, but as a form of recreational activity.

Until now, we have thought of strikes as issues which must be resolved. How much healthier if we saw them as an opportunity to get together with like-minded friends and colleagues and share some cardiovascular exercise – marching, waving banners, shouting slogans and applauding mob orators.

If all the Government’s scientists spent less time in their laboratories and more in the open air demanding pay parity with one another and generally filling their lungs, the effects would be far-reaching and beneficial. The same goes for tax inspectors, traffic wardens, outreach co-ordinators, gender monitors, race relations officers, playgroup synergy counsellors, health education managers, and anyone within spitting distance of a quango. If they were, every man jack of them, to stand in the street giving thumbs-up signs to passers-by, the benefit to society would be incalculable.

Besides, scientists need to get out more. According to Lady Greenfield, an Oxford professor and director of the Royal Institution, they have only just got “beyond the bottom-pinching stage”, which on the evolutionary scale is pretty retarded. She reproves them for their slow progress – not in reaching the clumsy groping stage but in accepting women. Female scientists still face “institutionally sexist attitudes”, she says, even though their bottoms are no longer assaulted.

If male scientists were to join their female colleagues in flexing some industrial muscle they would in time realise that, united in a common cause, all bottoms are equal, regardless of sex, creed or colour.

So, all in all, there is something to be said for striking, even when no one gives a fig whether you work or not, and especially when you are engaged in work of national unimportance. The very act of walking out tones the muscles and lifts the spirits. Where the Government scientists have led, we of the non-essential classes should not shirk to follow. If boffins in fisheries and aquaculture can turn their backs on the daily round of doing not much and, for a glorious 24 hours, breathe the heady air of freedom, so too can we.