I had been living in London for about a year when I decided to pack in my job at IBM and go to drama school. The boldness of that decision staggers me now. To this me – the one living in the age of austerity with the kids and the mortgage and the grown up job – the fact that such a young and intrepid incarnation of myself ever existed is a little frightening. Was I mad?

When I quit my job, I had to move. I had been living in a shared house – a nice big house – with other people like myself: middle-class twentysomethings with a future. I couldn’t nearly afford it. But I found a place around the corner – a little 2-bedroom Georgian terraced house that some unscrupulous buy-to-let profiteer had carved into 6 bedrooms. A bedsit.

I went to check the place out. I had assumed the guy I had spoken to on the phone – loud, something like a subcontinental accent, broken english – was the landlord, and it was he who greeted me when I arrived. Turned out he was a tenant. He was shaven-headed, of indeterminate race, impossible to age. He looked a bit like Yul Brynner, I thought. His name was Javed.

The first thing he did was offer me food. Not biscuits, or crackers. A meal: beef stew, with rice. I’d just met the guy, and there was something odd about him. He spoke too loudly, and had a peculiar turn of phrase. The beef was stewed on the bone, which struck me as weird. I felt that if I ate more than a couple of forkfuls, I’d wake up gagged and bound in the cellar. I’d read about these things. But it was delicious, as good as anything I’d ever tasted, and I ate the lot.

While I ate, Javed – very nicely – interrogated me. Where was I from? What did I do? Did I have a girlfriend because if I did she couldn’t stay here.

When I finished he said, “I forgot to tell you, this is a strictly non-gay house!”

What?!

“That’s fine,” I said. You homophobic psycho.

I moved in, and though I tried my best to avoid him, I discovered before long that Javed was not only homophobic, but anti-Semitic, anti-American, pretty racist in almost every way, sexist and rude. He ran the house with what he called regimental rules, which meant you couldn’t drip on the bathroom floor, or leave cutlery draining by the sink. I always suspected the purpose of regimental rules was to allow Javed to pretend to himself most of the time that he lived on his own. Well, not entirely on his own. Javed’s best friend was a Pomeranian called Billy (a pedigree – Billy’s full name was Bill Clinton). Javed shaved Billy from the neck down, so he looked like a tiny lion. Billy hated everyone but Javed.

Other housemates came and went. There was a French guy, a couple of Italians. There was a Polish guy who only lasted two days because Javed wouldn’t let him cook all of his meals on the patio using a foldaway barbecue he kept in his room. Javed scared most of the other tenants away. If someone left, it was because of Javed.

Me, I worked all day, went to drama school in the evening, rolled in late. I hardly saw Javed so I lasted longer than most. Sometimes he would treat everyone to dinner, buy lots of wine. We’d all get pissed and pretend like Javed was a normal guy.

“Eat, drink, laugh, fucking hell,” he’d say.

One time Javed invited round a former housemate – someone who had lived in that little house for years, someone Javed referred to as a friend. I imagined a boor – someone as rude and racist and wrong as Javed. But the guy who came round was young, professional, polite. He was just like me. And he spoke to Javed like an old pal.

That was the first time I remember thinking there might be something to Javed I had missed.

The following summer was a period of relative stability in the house. We had a cohort of housemates who for one reason or another could tolerate Javed. It was hot. We ate outside a lot. Javed cooked for everyone. And he could cook. God, he could cook. Sometimes, the other guys would bring their girlfriends round, and Javed would be charming, polite and courteous. People liked him.

One night, Javed and I got very drunk, and he pulled out a big pile of photographs. “The women in my life,” he said. They were just pictures of Javed with women. I’d guess they went back ten years or so. Many looked to have been taken in far flung places. He looked exactly the same age in every one.  They all seemed quite happy to have had their picture taken with him. Not as happy as him, mind. I can’t remember if it was before or after that I found out he had been married and lived in Germany for many years. It seemed to me that these were just pictures of women Javed had met in passing, but he remembered many of them by name.

One day, after a few drinks, Javed said: “I am a prince, you know.”

He went on to tell me about his family in Pakistan. He was from an upper class Karachi family. He had cousins in England, New Zealand, Canada. He told me how as kids, he and his siblings would take ripe mangos from under the tree, squash them, and then suck the juice out of the unbroken skin through a hole they made in the end. He still ate mangos that way, and for a while I did too.

I asked him why he chose to live in a bedsit in Finsburk Park. He said he couldn’t go back while Billy was alive. Another time, he said he wouldn’t go back until the country was politically stable.

One night, the other housemates were out and Javed had some friends round. All, old, wealthy Pakistani men like him. One of his friends brought his wife’s nihari, a spicy beef stew. Javed invited me to eat with them. They put the pot in the middle of the table and we each had an empty bowl to fill and a plate of bread.

For reasons I don’t understand, nihari is quite hard to get in the UK. It is probably the most flavour-packed dish I’ve ever tasted. Cheap cuts (typically shin) are stewed on the bone with various spices. Traditionally, the dish is slow cooked overnight and eaten for breakfast with lots of bread. Done right, it’s so tender that you can lift the bone out of the bowl and the meat will stay in the gravy.

I tucked in. After a minute Javed said quietly, “remind me to tell you about Pakistani manners.” I had been pulling huge chunks of meat out of the pot and leaving the gravy. The meat is the expensive bit, and I’d been hogging it.

He was an old fashioned sort of guy. One of the housemates, a really good lad whom Javed was particularly fond of, convinced Javed to let him have a party. It was clear Javed had misunderstood what this had meant when the boy’s mates showed up with their decks and soundsystem. But he went along with it. About an hour into the party, Javed took the microphone from the MC and announced that there was lentil soup and bread for whoever wanted it. Everyone laughed. Javed looked confused.

He worked nights, driving a minicab, not because he needed the money but because he liked the conversation. One night, he pulled his cab to the side of the road and told the young women in the back that they would have to make the rest of the journey themselves. When they protested, he  asked them if they wouldn’t mind calling him an ambulance. He’d had a stroke.

I lived in that little bedsit for several years, only leaving when it was time to move in with Grace. (“Princess Grace,” Javed called her.) And it surprised me to discover that I missed the old bastard. A couple of years later, when Grace was heavily pregnant, we swung by Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park to see if we could see him. He’d go down on a weekend for no other reason than to wind up the zealots. (It turned out that none of Javed’s objectionable views were very strongly held.) And we found him, Billy under his arm, yelling at a fundamentalist Christian that “Jesus was a Jamaican”

Here’s some footage I found on YouTube, from last year. Javed’s the one in the cap, causing trouble.

I don’t like going on strike. I bloody love my job. And, frankly, it’s expensive losing a day’s pay. I left my old union, PCS, because they didn’t seem to understand that calling a strike should be what you do when you have no cards left to play, when lobbying has failed and negotiation has been completely exhausted.

My new union, the FDA, likes to negotiate. Our members include some of the most senior officials in Whitehall. Not only do we like to negotiate, we’re usually pretty good at it. The FDA has balloted its members on a strike only twice in its 92-year history. We don’t like to do it, and we don’t usually need to. We like to negotiate.

This Government does not like to negotiate. It thinks negotiations are a bit of a joke, not to be taken seriously. When my union officials reported with dismay the inept approach to pension negotiation they witnessed coming from this Government, I believed and trusted them, because this is a union whose track record shows that they take this stuff very seriously indeed. They’re not militant. They’re not prone to rhetoric. They wanted desperately to reach an agreement.

It’s important to us in the public sector that we have unions who will negotiate on our behalf. In the private sector you can negotiate for yourself, name your own terms, make a case for better pay. You can do all that face to face, with your employer. In the public sector we can’t, because our employer is the taxpayer. So we have grades and pay scales and all this crap that seems bureaucratic but is actually designed for fairness and to keep control of how public money is spent. We’re given a grade, and we take the pay and the conditions that come with that grade, and we trust our unions to protect that pay and those conditions, by negotiating on our behalf.

My union believes the taxpayer can afford our pensions. Why? Well, the cost to the public purse of public sector pensions has peaked. It’s already falling. Left alone, according to the best estimates, the cost of public sector pensions as a proportion of GDP will fall, year on year, every year, for at least the next fifty years. The Government knows this. It’s in the Hutton report, which they commissioned. But we’re living longer. We’re enjoying longer retirements. Depending on certain social factors, some degree of reform may be needed to make these pensions sustainable. This is Hutton’s argument. It’s a fair one. And there, you have a basis for negotiation.

But the Government isn’t interested in negotiation. Until this very month, they had made not one serious concession. Despite repeated requests made by my union since negotiations began in the spring, they would not release the costings data for the pension schemes until the middle of last month. And despite the fact that meaningful negotiations could not possibly even start until that data had been received and properly analysed (and this isreally complex stuff), they then set an arbitrary eight-week deadline to conclude negotiations.  There’s a term for the approach the Government have taken. It’s calledplaying silly buggers. And it betrays the fact that, for them, this was never about making pensions more sustainable. It was about something this Government takes far more seriously than the future welfare of public servants. For them, it was always about their commitment to deficit reduction, which they’re desperate to do as quickly as possible to placate the financial markets.

It’s just my view but, done fairly, I support deficit reduction. However, it’s a short-term goal. Pension reform is forever. And making permanent changes that will have negative consequences on people’s quality of life many years from now to solve a short term problem today isn’t fair, isn’t clever. And saying it’s about fairness and sustainability isn’t honest. It’s a downright lie.

It isn’t necessary, for the sustainability of pensions, to switch indexation from RPI to CPI, cutting at a stroke the value of pensions by 15%. It isn’t necessary to impose a levy on employee contributions amounting to 6% of salaries from next year, in the middle of a public sector pay freeze, when inflation is running at 5%. These are brutal, short-termist,deficit reduction measures, which will lower the living standards of many public servants by 20% over the next few years.

Here’s the kicker. That increase in employee contributions? The money raised is going straight to the Treasury. It isn’t even going to be used to make pensions more sustainable. It’s a levy. It’s a tax. Again, this is about deficit reduction, not sustainability.

Some will say public sector pensions are considerably more generous than private pensions. That’s because private sector employers have shafted their own employees by squeezing their pension funds in search of bigger and bigger profits. What has happened to private pensions is a scandal. I don’t want to live in a society where employers and the State race each other to see who can treat their employees the worst. That way, everybody loses.

Some will say it’s time for the public sector to take its share of the pain. The planned increase in employee contributions equates to a levy of £2.8bn. The levy on the banks equates to £2.5bn. So who’s taking the bigger share of the pain?

I live in an average household. We have a slightly lower than average household income and we live in London so our outgoings are pretty high. Since George Osborne’s emergency budget last year, we have suffered the total loss of our Working Tax Credit, as well as the effects of my pay freeze against a background of high inflation. These changes amount to the loss of a very large proportion of our household’s disposable income. Next year’s increase in pension contributions will be another sizeable chunk. For a family like us, living in London, with childcare to pay, these measures hurt like hell. They hurt me, and they hurt my kids. And my reward? According to the Government’s calculator, when I retire I can look forward to drawing £10,000 less per year.

So when the unions are trying earnestly to protect me and my family and millions like us, and the Government start dicking around with the negotiation process, trying to play hardball, play chicken, I feel insulted. When they offer last minute concessions and don’t give anyone the time to analyse them properly and work out what they mean, and then blithely threaten to take them off the table again, I feel insulted. When the Prime Minister gets up in Parliament and describes as irresponsible this action that we have tried so hard to avoid, I feel insulted. We have been treated with contempt. We have tried, repeatedly and with increasing desperation, to avoid this action. But here we are.

I don’t like going on strike. But I think industrial relations matter in the public sector. And for me, that’s what this is about. More than pensions. It’s about protecting the process by which we have always made sure our public servants are treated fairly as servants of the public, who don’t ask to be paid the same as they would in the private sector because they see the value in what they do, not in how much money it pulls in, but in how it improves lives. More than our pensions, it’s that process that I feel is under threat here. People say unions are anachronistic, or that they’re trying to drag the country backwards. But I’ve seen first hand how hard unions work to promote gender equality, diversity and work/life balance. I say we’re pushing things forward. But we can’t do it unless we’re treated respectfully. That’s what previous governments have done. This one needs to start doing the same.