Chickens happy to put Colonel Sanders in 10 Downing

For anyone that trust what the Daily Mail publishes with more than a grain of salt, this item is quite interesting:

Members of the Unite workers union, which includes many British Airways flight crews that went on strike over the last month, have indicated in a poll that they would prefer to see Conservative leader David Cameron become Prime Minister. The poll, which the Daily Mail says was commissioned by the Conservatives but administered independently, finds that 34 percent of the 500+ Unite members surveyed want Cameron as prime minister, five percent more than Gordon Brown. (Only 14 percent favoured Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg.)

Of course, in Daily Mail fashion, that statistic is buried deep in the story. Instead, they trump up the figure where 81 percent say it's "time for a change", implying that an overwhelming majority of this "far-left" union support the centre-right Tories. However, the remaining figures do not fare well for Labour, as three out of four Unite members would prefer that the union not spend their dues on supporting political candidates but instead themselves, and three out of five are dissatisfied with Brown's performance.

Labour and the major workers unions have strayed apart following the largely unsuccessful and violent miners strike of 1984. Arthur Scargill, who led the National Union of Mineworkers during the strike, broke from the Labour Party in 1996 when Tony Blair effectively renounced socialism in Labour's campaign manifestos. The largest union in the UK, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, spearheaded a separate electoral alliance of socialist and union-oriented parties in 2009 to contest races for the European Parliament. No2EU, Yes to Democracy, now the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, expresses a more left-oriented brand of Euroscepticism, counter to the pro-business platform of UKIP.

Of course, as this was a poll commissioned by the Conservatives, there probably was no mention of the TUSC in the survey, or the results would have probably gone against their favour. But for the time being, this is another jab at the Labour establishment, painting them as starkly similar to a dystopian Animal Farm, and providing relevance to the ironic statement "Chickens for Colonel Sanders".

And of course, this report (which I've not found published in any other UK paper yet) comes from the same paper which (by way of a different editorial staff, obviously) endorsed Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in the 1935 election.