Strikebreakers are doing a public service

Because of the reluctance of many of the members of the RMT led by Bob Crow to back the strike, there were intermittent services on the Victoria, Northern and Jubilee lines and on part of the District line.

For some staff to turn up to work is testimony to the fact that even among his own members, support for Bob Crow's strike is limited.

Indeed, fewer than a third of RMT members voted for the strike.

Among the public, many of whom are struggling in the recession to keep their jobs and homes, this strike could not have come at a worse time.

Businesses that lose money and customers today and workers who must spend hours trying to get to and from work will feel real anger that the RMT leadership can have so little regard for them.

The fact that, as we report today, the RMT walked out of talks at the last moment, while there was still an opportunity of resolving the underlying dispute, will not endear the strikers to the public.

And even the RMT, which has scant regard for public opinion, has to be aware that it has no backing for this dispute.

There are serious matters at issue, chiefly job security for those employees of the failed Metronet consortium taken over by London Underground: there are reports that 3,000 jobs could be lost.

Yet London Underground has promised that no front-line workers, such as drivers or engineers, will be made redundant and that compulsory redundancies among administrative staff will be kept to a minimum.

The problem is whether it can give a guarantee of no compulsory job losses.

This question could perhaps have been resolved had negotiations continued; instead Bob Crow walked out, saying he had a strike to run.

The RMT does indeed hold London to ransom, in the sense that it can inflict a great deal of pain on the capital with relative ease.

Yet its own members may well be unwilling to take further strike action at Mr Crow's behest, not merely because they have no public backing, but because they, too, will be losing pay in hard times.

The Mayor, Boris Johnson, must be prepared to take on the RMT, as his predecessor, Ken Livingstone, did.

The strikebreakers are doing a public service; now the union leadership must be faced down.

NHS: this will hurt

The major parties are committed to protecting the NHS budget from the effects of the public sector deficit but there is no protecting it from the realities of an ageing population and the rising cost of new treatments.

As a result, according to the NHS Confederation, the service faces a severe financial shortfall: real term reductions of more than £8 billion in the three years from 2011.

The culture shock for the NHS will be the greater because funding has tripled since 1997 when Labour came to power.

Yet it is worth reflecting that much of that money was spent not on frontline patient care but on lucrative contracts for consultants and on middle management structures.

The challenge for any future Health Secretary will be to ensure that the bureaucrats do not manage to translate the cost-cutting into reduced care for patients while keeping layers of administration in place.

Cost-cutting must be rational: focused on cutting back non-essential services such as IVF and, more importantly, reducing bureaucracy.

Cuts must be made but it is up to government to ensure they happen in the right places.

Victoria's values

These are difficult times and we all need a bit of cheer.

In this spirit, Victoria Beckham has returned to this country to cheer on the England team against Andorra dressed to kill in counter-recession, feelgood glamour.

We all have our own ways of being patriotic: this is Mrs Beckham's.