The great danger with any public employee strike is that the public will eventually realize that the sky is not falling in the government workers' absence. I'd imagine the last thing a member of a large-scale bureaucracy would want is to give the people under its thumb a chance to look around unfettered for a bit.

The comments BBC's "Your Say" section on this subject contained a heartening balance of contempt for the civil service, even if the Beeb couldn't resist putting the pro comments at the top.

Top work, Tony! :-)

Amazingly, my life also didn't come to an end yesterday, when the 'hard-working but under-paid' denizens of the Office of Lies, Damned Lies, and Government Statistics gave themselves an even longer bank holiday than they normally enjoy at our expense.

But would it be too much for just one BBC interviewer on the Today program to ask the question?:

If you don't like your job or your pay rates, why don't you try to get a job somewhere else?

Ah, we will know true anarcho-capitalist utopia is finally around the corner when that question finally gets asked of any public sector striker, on the BBC. I won't hold my breath! ;-)

Just out of curiosity, how much smoother are things running in Britain now with all those "civil servants" not being on the job? Personally I'd GLADLY pay them to stay home and leave the productive work to those of us in the private sector (as we call it here in the states.)