Postcard from London: Wisconsin on the Thames

[Geee]

Human Events:

LONDON -- Big Labor looks the same wherever you go: petulant, irrational and wholly aggrieved beyond its means. I'm here on vacation with family as some 750,000 public-sector employees strike in protest over modest pension reform proposals. It's a taste of Wisconsin on the Thames.

U.K. government teachers are just as shameless and entitlement-mongering as their American counterparts. More than half of England's schools shut down on Thursday as union members took to the streets.

Borrowing a trademark tactic employed by Democrats Against Fiscal Responsibility from Madison and Milwaukee, Wis., to Washington, D.C., British educators used their students and children as kiddie human shields. "HANDS OFF ME MA'S PENSION" read a doe-eyed little girl's sign in Liverpool. The militant National Union of Teachers plastered their placards with infant-sized, pastel-colored handprints.

Simon Shaw, a teachers' union rep in Woodford Green, complained to his local newspaper: "The government is stealing our money, and working till 65 or 68 is not realistic. How do teachers relate to children or have the energy for them at that age?" Asra Haque, a union protester and teacher in Kingsburgy, piled on: "What the government is doing makes us feel like we are part of a dictatorship."

On Twitter, a socialist activist proclaimed "solidarity" between strikers in London and democracy marchers in Egypt. The supposedly fascist measures at issue involve an average hike in teachers' pension contributions of about 3 percent and, in keeping with demographic reality, a gentle nudge in the retirement age to 68 by 2020.