Brown condemns BA strike

Brown, who is battling to maintain Labour's 13-year-grip on power in an election expected on May 6, said the seven-day strike was "unjustified and deplorable" and should be cancelled.

The Unite union that has called the strike is the largest financial backer of Brown's Labour party and its political director, Charlie Whelan, was once Brown's spokesman.

"It's the wrong time, it's unjustified, it's deplorable, we should not have a strike. It's not in the company's interest, it's not in the workers' interest and it's certainly not in the national interest," Brown told BBC Radio.

"I hope that this strike will be called off," he said in an interview on the Woman's Hour programme.

Most BA cabin crew plan a three-day strike starting next Saturday, followed by a four-day walkout from March 27, jeopardising Easter holiday plans for thousands of travellers.

BA on Monday said it aimed to fly around 45,000 customers a day during the first stoppage, roughly 60 percent of those booked to fly on those days, with short haul services at Heathrow and Gatwick likely to be worst hit.

It also said the majority of flights spanning the second strike period would remain in the schedule and that it would provide an update after the first strike period had ended.

BA has trained other staff to fill in as cabin crew during the strike, and has said it will hire 22 fully-crewed planes from charter companies to help run flights from Heathrow.

BA's shares closed 0.1 percent down at 235.5 pence, valuing the company at around 2.7 billion pounds.

Unite last week said it was 10 million pounds away from reaching a settlement with BA -- half the amount analysts expect BA to lose per day if the strikes go ahead.

CONSERVATIVE ATTACK

The opposition Conservatives, their opinion poll lead shrinking in recent surveys, accused Brown of hypocrisy.

"He (Gordon Brown) can't condemn the strike whilst at the same time taking money from the strikers' union," their finance spokesman George Osborne told a business summit.

"In the end it's a question of leadership for Gordon Brown. He has to cut off the links with the Unite union."

Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis said that attempts to politicise the dispute would make it harder to resolve.

"This is an industrial dispute, not a political dispute," Adonis told the upper House of Lords. Adonis said on Sunday that the strike threatened BA's existence.

The Labour party was founded by the trade union movement, which remains its main financial backer, but the unions are far less powerful than in the 1970s, when they used to hold regular policy meetings with Labour.

The prime minister's spokesman declined to comment on reports that Brown had called Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley over the weekend to discuss solutions to the strike.

Woodley on Monday said politicians were using the unions as a scapegoat in the dispute.

"I don't blame our PM for trying to help bring together parties to resolve the dispute," he said in a statement.

"But it is rather unfortunate that politicians of all parties always want to kick the unions and kick the employees, when in actual fact it's my members who've been kicked here."

(Additional reporting by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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