Higher Education has something of a genteel image, so that industrial militancy in universities can seem as incongruous as full frontal nudity during an episode of Songs of Praise. The suggestion that lecturers might be at the forefront of class struggle has a whiff of the Dave Spart about it. We are prone to think that pickets lines fit more naturally outside factory gates than faculty offices.
This in itself tells us something about the dated nature of our instincts about both work and about universities. The refashioning of British capitalism since the 1980s has witnessed both de-industrialisation and the growing need for a technically educated workforce, both trends making universities a less unlikely front in industrial relations than they might first seem. Universities themselves are, in any case, disappointingly unlike their portrayal on Endeavour, let along Brideshead Revisited. Staffed by an increasingly casualised, not infrequently hourly-paid, academic workforce, backed up by worse paid academic related staff, all presided over by an ever weightier layer of senior management, there is little idyllic to be found here.
The current UCU dispute over pensions is important and deserves the full support of everyone in the labour movement. Not only does it represent the revival of a struggle over public sector pensions (and by extension, all pensions) which has been moribund since 2011, but the viciousness with which managements have responded to strike threats is a barometer for current thinking amongst senior HR personnel throughout the economy: in most universities affected by the strike aggressive emails have been sent out to staff; attempts have been made to trick workers into declaring beforehand that they will strike (the claim being that this information is needed to keep up pension payments), and most worryingly, several universities have - with dubious legality - asserted that they will treat failure to reschedule classes cancelled because of strikes as action short of a strike, and will dock pay accordingly. This last move is an attempt to change a withdrawal of labour into a rescheduling of labour, the only effect being that the workers in question get less pay. It is the academic equivalent of expecting a car worker who has been on strike one day to produce twice as many car components the next.
If university bosses are allowed to win through these kind of tactics, it will set a disturbing precedent. They are, however, weak and divided - today one vice-Chancellor broke ranks with Universities UK. Labour activists can be crucial in winning this struggle: pass motions at your branches, but above all make contact with your local UCU branch. Find out how you can help. Find out if the management at your local university have been using the aggressive tactics mentioned above. If so, get your Labour MP to complain directly to the vice-Chancellor, or if you don't have a Labour MP, get your CLP to do so. One victorious strike would make all the difference right now in Britain. Whether or not this strike is victorious depends on all of us.
An industrial dispute with the potential to be one of the most significant in the UK in recent years has reached a new stage. For details see here. Support throughout the Labour movement is essential.
This Branch/ CLP notes that after prolonged attempts to
negotiate with Universities UK over proposed reforms to pensions, the
Universities and College Union has voted to take industrial action in pre-1992
universities. This is likely to begin on 22nd February. Central to
the proposed changes is the abolition of defined benefit pensions. We believe:
·That all workers are entitled to a decent
retirement.
·That defined benefit schemes are a good way to
secure this.
·That the attack on pensions in universities
represents the latest front in an attack on public sector pensions.
·That this is part of a process of levelling-down
of pension provision that will have a negative impact on all workers, whether
in the public or private sectors.
We resolve:
·To support UCU’s industrial action.
·To liaise with the UCU branch at [LOCAL
UNIVERSITY] and get details of picket lines; to inform our membership of these
by email and to encourage members to turn up and support them.
·To write to the vice-Chancellor at [LOCAL
UNIVERSITY] expressing our support for the strike and urging the employers to
negotiate reasonably with the union.
·To contact [LOCAL MP/ LABOUR CANDIDATE] asking
her/ him to both write to the vice-Chancellor and to communicate her/ his support
to the UCU branch at [LOCAL UNIVERSITY]
The motion will
require alteration if there is no pre-1992 university locally.
As large numbers of people took to London today to protest against austerity, I was at a local demonstration against a particular manifestation of the government's political and economic agenda: NHS cuts.
This comes, of course, the week before junior doctors withdraw their labour entirely, the first time doctors have taken industrial action of this sort in the history of the NHS. The immediate cause of the dispute are new contracts, which will disadvantage junior doctors financially and push them into working exhausting and unsafe hours. The issues are explained here. In the face of the misinformation being spread about the doctors and their demands by the government and their friends in the media, it is vital that the BMA's case is given publicity. If you feel able, challenge criticism of the strike when you hear it. The previous link is to a PDF of a BMA leaflet. You could print and distribute this.
The misinformation and attacks will be stepped up as the strike moves towards a greater intensity. Striking doctors will feel vulnerable and exposed. At this point, expressions of support and solidarity will matter: these really can make the difference between someone persisting with the action and their giving up. Find a local picket line and support it. Even going for a few minutes can make a difference. Having been a striker on a picket line myself, it really was incredibly heartening to know that people outside my workplace were behind us. Talk to strikers, bring food, coffee, whatever - above all, go.
Support from the Labour Party, locally and nationally, has been patchy. If this improves it would give political momentum to the doctors' cause, and increase the pressure on the government. If you're a member of a Labour or trade union branch pass a motion in support of the strike. Write to local Labour MPs and (politely) ask them to get behind the action. Here is a lightly adapted version of a motion passed by a CLP in Sheffield that you could use in your own context:
The NHS is being dismantled as a comprehensive, national, public service by this government, through both underfunding, marketisation and privatisation despite the NHS having proved itself as an efficient, successful and hugely popular model of healthcare.
The junior doctors dispute, together with the campaign to save NHS student bursaries, gives us an opportunity to step up our role in the fight to save the NHS.
This branch/ CLP resolves:
To support the junior doctors and NHS students, making links locally and visiting pickets lines and protests.
[To support (LOCAL NHS CAMPAIGN)]
To call on the party nationally to sharpen its stance on the NHS and clearly commit to reversing privatisation and marketisation and rebuilding a comprehensive, well funded publicly owned, run and provided NHS, based on meeting clinical need. Any integration of Health and Social care should be contingent on social care becoming a free, publicly funded and provided, service.
To call on the party nationally to raise its profile on these issues, sending Jeremy Corbyn to address mass meetings on the NHS around the country and organising a national demonstration to save and rebuild the NHS.
...not, you will note, Brexit. The sullying of our political discourse with this silly coinage manages to annoy me more than pretty much anything else around the sorry excuse for politics that is the current EU debate. Anyway.
The force for non-chauvinistic internationalism that is the red-white-and-blue clad Britain Stronger In Europe Campaign are putting about the claim that Britain leaving the EU would cause problems for the NHS. Here they are doing precisely that. They have two reasons for saying this. The first can be dismissed swiftly:
A series of experts have predicted our economy would fall into ‘recession’ if we left the EU, meaning cuts to public services like the NHS.
Now, far be it from me to disagree with un-named 'experts' about the possibility of a post-exit recession (after all, there is going to be a recession sooner or later, quite apart from Britain's relationship to the EU). But it simply does not follow that this would mean cuts to the NHS. That would be a political decision. This is basically what those of us who have opposed cuts made in the wake of the 2008-9 crisis have being saying about those. Their other claim is straightforwardly true:
And Vote Leave, the campaign for Britain to leave Europe, is run by people with a history of campaigning against the NHS.
They have campaigned for:
cuts to NHS spending and ending the NHS ring-fence
cuts to NHS staff pay
an increase in prescription charges
allowing NHS trusts to fail
increased NHS privatisation
Vote Leave is, there is no doubt about the matter, run by a shower of bastards. The only problem with this otherwise watertight strategy for getting the socially conscious to vote In is that exactly the same can be said for Britain Stronger In Europe. Although the list of members of their board is not displayed on BSE's website, it includes such luminaries as Peter Mandelson, Danny Alexander, and Damian Green. These are people who in various ways have contributed towards the privatisation and cutting of the NHS. The token non-bastard, Caroline Lucas, is not in a position to have much influence. In this respect she epitomises the position of the left more generally in the referendum debate.
As this might suggest, the referendum campaign is being conducted from the right by both sides. As far as I'm aware, nobody is actually running on a 'Our Position on the EU Makes It Easier to Clobber the Health Service' ticket. But both sides are certainly making the case that they are better placed to be tough on immigration and are advocating what is 'best for business'. With the Labour leadership half-heartedly falling behind a Labour In campaign headed up by Alan Johnson, again prioritising business as well as 'security', the prospects of any left voice being heard effectively during the next few months are precisely nil. Not, of course, that the perpetually over-optimistic British left will believe this in any numbers.
Now, I don't care terribly about all of this. Or rather, I don't care very much whether Britain stays in the EU. I care deeply that this debate is pitching politics to the right, and distracting attention from far more important issues. In actual fact I think that the impact of EU exit would be pretty minimal. The debate is basically a family row on the part of British capital, being conducted through the medium of politics. Those sections of capital whose markets are predominantly within the EU want to remain, others take a different view. And, as we saw with the Scottish referendum, the moment there is the tiniest threat that corporate profits might be under threat, out comes the hyperbole, out comes Project Fear. On the other hand, I don't think exit would pave the way for a British road to socialism, as the Stalinism re-enactment societies heading up the 'left' pro-exit case seem to think. Capitalism is a global system, and needs ultimately to be fought at a global level.
A footnote at this point. The most persuasive 'left' argument on the In side might seem to be based on the impact of the Social Chapter and similar instruments. So, Labour In For Britain, have this to say:
British workers benefit from EU agreements on workers’ rights, including the right to holiday pay, paid maternity and paternity leave, anti-discrimination laws, equal pay and protection for agency workers.
There is a seductive, but damaging, picture of the history of workers' rights at play here. These were not handed down from on high through the generosity of commissioners. They were fought for by workers themselves, organised into unions, in Europe and elsewhere. "No saviours from on high deliver".The struggles of unionised workers established norms for treatment in the workplace and in statute, which could not be transgressed without industrial strife. When standardised minimal conditions across the then EEC began to be discussed, these being needed for the smooth functioning of a single market, those norms had to be incorporated. They were, none the less, won from the bottom up, not the top down. In the presence of strong unions in Europe, the guarantees provided by the EU are irrelevant. In the absence of strong unions, those guarantees will be eroded in coming years.
Now, last year I blogged arguing for an abstention in this year's vote. Read it here. I agree with my reasoning in that post, but I now find myself disagreeing with my conclusion. I will, with little enthusiasm, and more that a little ennui, vote Leave. My reasons are two. First, far too much hope has been invested in the EU: from soft-leftists worshipping before the Social Chapter, to irritating liberals thinking they are a bulwark of cosmopolitan intelligence against their brutish inferiors (who all, you understand, hate foreigners). Illusions need to be laid bare, so that a better politics can thrive. Secondly, exit would precipitate a crisis in the Tory party, and that is no bad thing.
At the end of the day, however, all of this matters a lot less than people seem to think. So please don't spend hours agonising over how to cast your vote. If you want to do something useful, spend that time thinking about how you can support the junior doctors when they strike next month, and about how you're going to get to the Peoples' Assembly demonstration against austerity on 16th April.
Just a very quick post to plug the Right to Strike campaign - there is no more important battle in Britain at the moment than the one against the Tories' proposed anti-union laws that will impose harsh turnout limits on strike ballots, effectively counting every abstention as a 'No' vote, legalise the use of agency scabs, and undermine political funds. These rights are the result of a history of struggle, and are needed today more than ever, as working life is being subjected to casualisation and insecurity.
The initial target are public sector unions. In particular, I'm convinced that the Tories have RMT members on the London Underground squarely in their sights. The capacity of a union to bring the capital to a halt is an asset to our movement and an embarrassment to Cameron, who views them as Thatcher viewed the NUM.
Pass motions in support of the campaign at your union branch and local Labour Party, and keep an eye on the website. There are mobilising meetings coming up.
I received the text from David Lammy just as the protestors broke through the police line.
At that moment, I was standing opposite the gates of Downing Street on Whitehall. The group of protestors, who had marched from Trafalgar Square to join a demonstration against the Queen's Speech, were young and angry. David Lammy, meanwhile, was on the scrounge for nominations to be Labour's candidate for Mayor of London. "London needs leadership", his text acclaimed, leaving the reader in little doubt that it was Lammy's leadershipthe capital was lacking. The banner-waving crowd forcing their way down Whitehall didn't give the impression of needing leadership. And if they did, they weren't going to be looking to the MP for Tottenham to provide it.
The disconnect between a parliamentary Labour Party largely resigned to austerity and the ongoing movement against the attacks on public services deserves reflection. One thing is clear, however: the anger of those protestors was fully justified. Today's Queen's Speech was the most reactionary for a generation, and it laid bare the anti-democratic nature of austerity.
Austerity, as I like to think of it, is neo-liberalism in crisis mode, ever more frantically proposing the marketisation of society as the solution to the all too evident ills we face. As such, like neo-liberalism in general, it is a strategy to strengthen the power of capital against labour; in other words, to protect profit against the vast majority of people. When stated in those terms, neo-liberalism sounds like it is on a collision course with democracy - as indeed it is.
The self-denying approach to fiscal measures, asking parliament to tie its own hands by blocking tax rises for five years, already signals a commitment to a society where the market reigns supreme. More serious is the all-out attack on trade unions, the organisations through which working people begin to take control of their working lives. A double wammy of an assault on strike ballots and the legalisation of the use of agency scabs has the potential to paralyse unions' effectiveness so long as they remain within the bounds of the law. Proposals around subscriptions and political funds will also make life difficult for the union movement.
Beyond industrial democracy, political organisation is under attack. A draconian bill aimed at that slipperiest of characters, the extremist, promises to increase the state's power of surveillance and to allow it control over the activities of individuals considered extremist. Left-wing activists who do not fear for their freedoms are naive. Yet a democracy that does not allow fundamental questions to be asked about its nature, does not permit people to organise with the aim of transforming society, is a hollow sham.
Today the government declated an all-out war on democracy. And to add insult to injury, they propose to substitute a pastiche of the real thing, a vote with no good options. If we do want a future where our control of our own lives extends beyond the supermarket, now would be a good time to fight back.
If the austerity project is a relatively old inroad of reaction into popular consciousness, a newer one is a revived English nationalism. I spent polling day and the previous day in Thanet South. The broad left anti-UKIP campaign there did well, and it is fantastic that Farage didn't get elected. However, what Gerry Adams once said of the Provisional IRA applies to Farage's outfit: they haven't gone away you know. The UKIP phenomenon is real. Labour voters switched to UKIP there, elsewhere, and in particular in a number of northern seats, where the party is now in second place. The talk is now of UKIP's 2020 strategy, with the inroads made last night paying dividends in MPs at the next election.
It's entirely possible that UKIP won't exist in five years time. The British right is famously division-prone; the party has lost its leader, and its solitary MP is a loose cannon. Never the less, the UKIP phenomenon will certainly persist. Populist reaction, with a social base combining abandoned working class communities, the insecure middle-class, and elements of the bourgeoisie proper, is here to stay. Its ideological suture is the standard resentful premise that they are out to get what we have, or had. They want our money, our homes, our culture, our history. Underneath, on suspects, is the nagging fear also that they might being enjoying themselves more than we are.
The nature of them is flexible. They could be the European Union, migrants in general, Eastern Europeans, metropolitan liberals, hippies, benefit claimants, the Rothschilds, the Muslims, or the Scots. As is so often the way with ideology, whether or not they are, in fact, screwing us over is entirely independent of the ideological effectiveness of this pattern of thought. Metropolitan liberals are, as it happens, guilty as charged; Muslims, as it happens, are not. But that is not the point. The scapegoat provides a focus for political opposition, and thereby, like its biblical forebear, carries the sins that justice attributes to another - in this case, capital.
The Scots are the latest lucky targets; English nationalism is on the rise. The Scots, you see, want your money. The SNP, in particular, in a startlingly impolite move want political power. Will the subaltern never learn? UKIP both contributed and tapped in to a simmering English resentment, evident already during last autumn's election campaign. It was the Tories, however, that brought an English identity constructed against a Scottish threat into the mainstream. Indeed, as thought to prompt the political slow-learners who deny that anti-Scots racism exists, Boris Johnson warned of a coming Jockalypse.
The genie of English nationalism has been let out of the bottle. There's a lot of talk of 'English votes for English laws', a proposal which in current political context could only mean a shift rightwards south of Alnwick. There will, inevitably, be noise from Billy Bragg and other elements of the eclectic left about the need to resist the politics of English reaction with a 'progressive' English nationalism. This is premised on a basic misunderstanding of the ideological function of Englishness within the current politics of the UK. The nationalism of the dominant nation of a historic imperial power, currently defined in opposition to national autonomy movements within the same state, cannot be won for socialism by a bit of Morris Dancing. What is needed is a different politics altogether. At the time of writing that is nowhere to be seen.
Labour and the crisis of labourism
Which brings us belatedly to Labour. Labourism is dead in Scotland. It is at crisis point in England and Wales. Labour cannot rely on the votes of even a stable proportion of the working class, and that is only likely to get worse as generational profiles shift. Already the Blairite knives are out; journalists are being briefed that Labour lost because it pitched too left (a theory that, to put it mildly, has difficulty incorporating the data of Scotland), and that a move back to the centre-ground is the only way to restore Labour's electoral fortunes. The Labour left is institutionally weak, dispirited, and increasingly afflicted with cynicism. Intellectually, its Marxist elements are often hopelessly in thrall to a vulgar determinism, for which everything is to be explained by the 'low level of class struggle' (as though this were something independent of human agency) and which counsels riding out the tide, preserving 'the movement', by which is understood the Labour Party and the union link.
This last element is likely to come under attack in the wake of a near inevitable Blairite resurgence. Already the implementation of the Collins Report threatens the link. Meanwhile, the leader of Britain and Ireland's biggest union has openly supported Lutfur Rahman and threatened to form a new workers party in the event of the Labour loss that is now a reality. In any case, if the labour movement doesn't break with the party, it may be that the party breaks with the movement. The link has always been a target for the Blairite right.
Only a fool would take any delight in this. The Labour Party, for all its contradictory nature and in spite of the multiple betrayals of its leaders, is a substantial achievement of the British working class. If labourism were finally to die, even though the more excitable leftists will no doubt wax lyrical about 'great new opportunities', over a century of struggle would be laid to rest. Whether that happens, or whether another narrative plays out, the task that falls immediately to the left is the difficult one of at the same time resisting the assault of the Blairites within the party, whilst looking outwards to unions, the new community-based groups, and the extra-Labour left (the unpreparedness of Labour leftists to work with left groups outside the Party has been a serious brake on the British left). It has to become less white, less male, and less prone to mood swings between despair and pollyannaism.
I have to say, the current Labour left is not well equipped to carry this burden. But then we can never make history in circumstances of our own choosing.
So, you're considering voting for the Green Party?
I suspect I like you. I suspect, at least, we have a great deal in common politically. I mean there is just the outside possibility that you're some Barbour-clad NIBMYish eco-fascist, in which case I have nothing to say to you. Vote Green, for all I care, they're welcome to you. But you're probably not like that at all.
In all likelihood you're the kind of person who ends up in the bottom left hand corner of those 'what's your political alignment?' quiz things. You are probably anti-austerity, supportive of feminism, clear about migrants' rights, anti-Trident, and in favour of public ownership of utilities. You, like me, realise that things need to be done to safeguard the environment, but you will want those things done in a way that makes big polluting business, rather than ordinary people, bear the brunt of the cost. You, like me, will have been underwhelmed by the Labour manifesto launch earlier today. Sure there was some welcome stuff - commitments on health, education, zero-hours contracts, and non-doms. But the broader context was set by acceptance of the iron-logic of austerity, and that's before we even get near the horrible, indefensible, pledge about immigration controls. It's not good enough. We agree on that.
Yet I am suggesting you don't vote Green, but vote Labour instead. Isn't this madness? Don't the Green Party's policies fit much better with those you and I would both like to see? I don't deny it for one moment. But I don't think elections should be viewed as a form of policy bingo.
More about that in a moment. First, it is at least rehashing one of the tired old objections to voting Green in a First Past the Post electoral system. Like many tired, old, objections there is something to it. Do you really want to help a Tory or Lib Dem candidate? In only a handful of seats are the Greens realistic contenders; elsewhere, in an incredibly tight election, you are in danger, by voting Green, of helping your least favourite parties. Because, and here I will part company with the more fundamentalist anti-Labourites, there is a difference between the Tories and Labour. Not enough of a difference, to be sure, but a real difference. A difference that will be felt most by those in our society least able to afford it. As the local elections last year in the notorious Tory borough of Barnet demonstrate.
But that's not my main argument. I think that the impulse to vote Green often arises because someone, not unreasonably, thinks: there's an election coming up, whose policies most fit with my own preferences? If you're in any way left-of-centre, and live in England or Wales, the Green Party are likely to be the best fit.
Yet there's a basic contradiction here. You are minded to vote Green because you think there is something fundamentally wrong with the world, and that radical change is needed. Perhaps you might go so far as to describe yourself as an anti-capitalist. Certainly, you are likely to be hostile to the individualistic, market-driven nature of our society. And yet you are, I claim, adopting an approach to elections that is a product of that society. You, the isolated individual political consumer, pick the product from the shelf that best fulfils your bespoke requirements.
The politics I am interested in starts from a very different perspective - not with lone electoral consumers, but with the recognition that real social change comes through movements of people, through our collective strength. It is about more than voting once every five years. It is about winning change in our workplaces and local areas; about exerting pressure continuously on those at Westminster and elsewhere who claim to represent us. This has to be a collective endeavour, and so the question arises, which movement of people is best placed to win the change we want to see, and how does this relate to voting?
The trade union movement, for all its imperfections, is the only millions-strong movement of working class people in Britain with the history and present capacity to win any serious level of change. The Labour Party was its hard won creation; and what makes the worst Labour government better than the best Tory government continues to be the pressure to which it is susceptible from trade unions. It was this that made even Blair introduce a minimum wage. It anchors Labour in working class politics in a way that the Greens, ecclectic and unpredictable as they have been in local office, are not. Electing Labour representatives strengthens the union's voice, and empowers us to fight for ourselves 365 days a year outside parliament. A Labour vote is a vote for a movement, for our collective strength - whichever political inadequate standing on a lightly-rewarmed neo-liberal ticket might have the Labour candidacy. (And if you're, rightly, angry about that, why not join the LRC and help to change Labour?)
You may or may not be convinced. But at the very least I want to hear your alternative. Not simply your alternative on voting day. That's one day in five years. I want to hear about your alternative movement for transforming society at the root. That's my truth - the working class and its institutions - you tell me yours.
Now, as you will know, I am on the pessimism-without-hopelessness wing of the British Left. I think a lot of stuff, not least the Left itself, is rubbish, and things are not going to get a whole lot better until we realise this. This said, yesterday's TUC 'Britain Needs a Payrise' march was really quite good.
I measure the size of political demonstrations, thus: I start at the front of the march, peel off to a cafe en route, and count the number of courses I can eat whilst the march files past. I then rejoin the back. This was at least a two course and coffee affair, but I got distracted when a friend turned up, so it could well have been considerably bigger. Those preferring the more orthodox method of counting demonstrators to assess size place the numbers around the 90,000 mark.
This was pretty impressive, especially on a day when the weather was far from wonderful, and had been forecast to be worse. There was a really good feel about the demo - and an incredibly diverse bunch of marchers. The big unions were out in force, but so were smaller, and significant groups - fast food workers, the brilliant Focus E15 Mothers, peace and environmental groups, and many, many, others. Against those who question the point of A-to-B marches: one of the great things about big demonstrations around trade union issues is that they bring different groups of workers into contact, giving everyone present a sense that they are not alone, offering inspiration and providing an opportunity for conversations. They also say something pretty powerful to those who watch them pass.
Given that pessimism I was talking about, there has to be a 'but' doesn't there? Here it comes. But whilst A-to-B marches are worthwhile, they are not enough. It was brilliant that we were demonstrating the weekend after 400,000 healthcare workers had taken strike action. Wouldn't it have been better if we were doing so additionally the weekend after local government workers had also been on strike? The timidity of the Unison bureaucracy in calling off that strike in favour of 'consultation' on a sub-inflation pay proposal, is shameful. If we want the pay increases advocated by union leaderships yesterday, industrial action will be needed. There is simply no point in standing on a podium uttering fine words about pay, unless those words are followed up by sustained action.
Whilst we're on the subject of action, union bosses are supposed to be in the business of political, as well as industrial action. Here again, the leaders of the UK's big unions struck exactly the right chord yesterday. As reported by the Mirror, Unite's Len McCluskey said,
The Tory mission is to destroy the welfare state, characterising anyone on benefit as a scrounger. This country needs more than a pay rise. We need a government that fights against cuts. We say to the corporate giants who say we can’t afford it: Pay your taxes.
Bang on the the money, Len. Meanwhile Unison's Dave Prentis told the crowd,
We are here to say enough is enough. We shall no longer sit back and allow pay to decline
Exactly right.
Unison and Unite, along with other unions represented at the demo in large numbers (such as the CWU) are affiliated to the Labour Party. Given the, admirable, opposition the leaderships of these unions have expressed to austerity and low pay, you'd assume that they'd use this affiliation to push Labour towards anti-austerity, pro-worker policies, wouldn't you? Yet here's a curious fact for you to mull over. With the sole exception of BECTU, the representatives of all affiliated unions at July's national policy forum voted against a future Labour government rejecting Tory spending plans. That is to say, they voted in favour of continued austerity.
Britain certainly does need a payrise. Or rather, the British working class, or even better, the working class, need a payrise. (Some bits of Britain seem quiteadequately paid already). We won't get it unless we fight for it, and increase pressure on those who are supposed to represent us.
Since Margaret Thatcher shuffled off to the great free market in the sky it seems a credible guess that Nick Clegg is the least popular politician in Britain. Therefore, to state what should be blindingly obvious, there is no achievement in winning a public debate against him. In the face of all the 'UKIP comes of age' hype to which we've been subjected since Clegg and Farage locked horns on Wednesday, it needs to be stressed that the public considering that you've won against Clegg in debate is only a victory in the fashion that being voted a better GP than Harold Shipman would be.
On UKIP I have nothing really to say. The best analysis I have seen came last year from Lenin, and I refer the inquisitive reader to him. I think Miliband is pretty stupid to call for him to be excluded from leaders' debates. These debates are a depressing marker of a descent into presidential politics, so I really shouldn't care too much about what happens at them, but there we are.
What I do care about is the lack of any serious Left voice over the EU. What we witnessed the other evening was an internal row within British Capital. To over-simplify a little, Clegg (and 'progressive' opinion more generally, including the Labour front-bench) speaks for an alliance between those elements of the bourgeoisie proper whose profit depends on access to European market, Farage for more Atlantic-orientated Capital and those parts of the petty bourgeoisie who can't be tempted into the Brussels club by Guardianista noises about the bright new international peaceable future.
The section of the population who don't find representation in this otherwise admirably inclusive dichotomy are the vast majority - those dependent on wages to survive. Confusion abounds in this area, it is not unusual to hear people claiming the Social Charter (the role of which as a kind of insurance policy for competing national Capitals deserves more analysis anyway) as a great victory for workers handed them by the EU, in spite of it having nothing to do with that institution, instead being a treaty of the distinct Council of Europe. Less obviously inaccurate advocacy of the EU as good for workers has a more delusional character. Billy Hayes here seems to think that neoliberal policy is accidental to the developed EU, as though sufficient will-power on the part of social democratic parties could bring about some kind of continent-wide analogue of the post-war consensus. He's not the first person to suggest this, the only problem being that the institutions he envisages being claimed for Beveridge and Keynes were set up precisely to drive a stake through the heart of those thinkers.
A Left voice on the EU is lacking. We have to start saying loudly, more clearly, and less nationalistically (*cough* No2EU), that neither Clegg nor Farage have anything to offer the workers of Europe. The EU as a project serves to sustain profit, not the workers who produce those profits. Even moderate ameliorative measures are ruled out of court by EU legislation - in particular, any government seeking to reverse privatisation would find itself severely constrained. The Eurozone crises following the crash of 2007-8, with austerity imposed centrally on the poorer periphery of the Union, give a taste of the direction in which further integration on the EU model leads. Workers nowhere in Europe have a long-term material interest in the EU, nor in any country's continued membership of it.
A socialist and internationalist alternative is needed - that much is just a trite slogan, but true in spite of that. At no time since the 1975 referendum has advocacy of any such alternative been weaker in Britain. Given that the EU as an issue is likely to dominate increasingly in coming years, this should concern us.
It is no doubt a symptom of the onset of middle age that I am worrying about the state of the Labour left, and it particularly its failure to attract the young. I have been aided and abetted in this worry by Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle. If you've not read it, you should - here.
He is, I think, unfair to the Twitter ultra-left. If he has the people in mind I suppose him to have in mind, many of them are prodigiously talented, thoughtful, and have been involved in some impressive feats of organisation. Nonetheless his diagnosis of a (big) layer of the young left, termed by Fisher 'neo-anarchists', is spot on:
They are also overwhelmingly young: in their twenties or at most their early thirties, and what informs the neo-anarchist position is a narrow historical horizon. Neo-anarchists have experienced nothing but capitalist realism. By the time the neo-anarchists had come to political consciousness – and many of them have come to political consciousness remarkably recently, given the level of bullish swagger they sometimes display – the Labour Party had become a Blairite shell, implementing neo-liberalism with a small dose of social justice on the side. But the problem with neo-anarchism is that it unthinkingly reflects this historical moment rather than offering any escape from it. It forgets, or perhaps is genuinely unaware of, the Labour Party’s role in nationalising major industries and utilities or founding the National Health Service. Neo-anarchists will assert that ‘parliamentary politics never changed anything’, or the ‘Labour Party was always useless’ while attending protests about the NHS, or retweeting complaints about the dismantling of what remains of the welfare state. There’s a strange implicit rule here: it’s OK to protest against what parliament has done, but it’s not alright to enter into parliament or the mass media to attempt to engineer change from there. Mainstream media is to be disdained, but BBC Question Time is to be watched and moaned about on Twitter. Purism shades into fatalism; better not to be in any way tainted by the corruption of the mainstream, better to uselessly ‘resist’ than to risk getting your hands dirty.
All of which is true, but which poses more urgently the question - framed by Fisher in Leninist terms calculated to enrage his subjects - 'what is to be done?' His own suggest is the rejection of identitarianism* and the revival of class politics. And bravo for that, but as advice goes it floats at a blisteringly high level of abstraction. Ironically, given his (correct) criticism of moralism on the left, Fisher's more concrete advice seems to be aimed at those he is discussing - change your behaviour and your attitudes.
So let me rephrase the question. Not "what is to be done?", but rather "what are we to do?". If the likes of me are correct, and class politics has to be the starting point for challenging capitalism and its concomitant oppressions, and if I am further correct that the state of play in Britain is such that class politics can't be effective whilst short-cutting the existing labour movement and its institutions, an indelicate question arises. Given the past couple of decades of defeat, uselessness, and morose resignation, how exactly do we make the case to those eager to change the world that the British labour movement is the place to do it?
I don't have a particularly good answer. But I think that this is the right question.
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*Which doesn't mean - or shouldn't mean - the rejection of politics based around particular non-class oppressions. If you want a good example of someone doing intersectionality in a way that doesn't undermine class politics (indeed strengthens it by the draw-dropping observation that some working class people are women, see Rhian Jones' Clampdown.)
Higher Education, traditionally a context favourable to the Left, trade unions, and other such sensible things, currently under sustained attack from the Coalition - this has got to be an important area for the fightback against this government, right? How's that going?
Well, there is some really positive stuff. Whatever else you do, look at the 3 Cosas Campaign - fighting, already with partial success, for sick pay, holidays, and pensions for outsourced workers at the University of London. Disgracefully let down by the branch and regional UNISON officials, the workers have organised themselves autonomously. Some good stuff is happening that is in many ways a model, and is getting attention. Please support their strike fund.
Elsewhere things are less positive. Faced with real terms pay cuts and declining conditions, there was a move towards co-ordinated action between Unison, UNITE, and UCU, bringing academic and support staff together on picket lines. Retreating from this, UCU have called a series of two hour strikes.
Now, I'm a UCU member. I teach at an evening-based institution, so these strikes will have no impact whatsoever on my teaching. In fact, I think this a pathetic excuse for industrial action, is recognised by members as such, and is causing our union to lose both credibility and members.
This said I believe in supporting collective action - 'don't cross a picket line' is a mantra with good reason. We need a culture that fosters collectivity, solidarity, and confidence when these things are in short supply. So I will not do any academic work during our mini-walkouts. But I'll use the strike times as best I can to argue against the UCU leadership's de-escalation of this dispute. We need proper strikes, lasting at least a day, co-ordinated with other unions.
Because, let's face it - well planned short stoppages in a factory or a railway can be devastating and effective. I am not entirely convinced that the government will be trembling at my threat not to read anything between 11am and 1pm one day.
We have to do better than this. Too much is at stake.
