Quantcast
Channel: Socialist Review - Mark L Thomas

Why is Labour so weak?

0
0
Issue section: 
30th March 2015
Issue: 
401

After five years of the Tories' austerity programme, and unrelenting assault on the welfare state, Labour should be roaring ahead in the polls. Mark L Thomas explains why this is not the case.

Why isn’t Labour a shoo-in for May’s general election? The Conservative-LibDem coalition has driven through the biggest onslaught on public services, the welfare state and workers’ wages in decades, yet Labour has been unable to develop anything close to a convincing lead over the Tories, and in some polls even falls behind them. As a result, the outcome of the general election remains very unpredictable.

Labour is failing to inspire. Even many of those planning to vote for Labour are troubled at its timidity and lacklustre performance.
So Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, vents her frustration with Labour’s weakness:

“The slogan at Labour’s [Spring] conference — ‘A Better Plan: A Better Future’ — was not exactly a pulse-racer. Ed Miliband’s speech was fine, but not newsworthy. Momentum in the last year — at a snail’s pace — has been with Cameron... Only indignation and downright outrage at Cameron and Osborne’s plans can cut through. Miliband doesn’t burn with fury.”

But it’s difficult to burn with indignation towards something if you largely agree with it. Labour’s Achilles heel is simple: it has committed itself to accepting that the priority for the next government is to reduce public spending in order to eradicate the budget deficit. Labour is committed to matching the Tory’s spending plans for 2015-16 and to balancing the budget by the end of the next parliament. Just before Christmas, shadow chancellor Ed Balls spelt out what this would mean — under a Labour government departmental spending budgets would be cut not just in 2015-16 but for each year until the overall budget deficit is balanced.

Of course, Labour has made some promises — to abolish the bedroom tax, a 20-month price freeze on energy bills (not renationalisation of energy companies), and scrapping the Health and Social Care Act for the NHS. But Labour’s central commitment to “austerity with a red rosette”, as PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka once dubbed it, colours everything. So Labour may want to (temporarily) freeze energy bills but it also wants to freeze public sector pay.

Labour says it will abolish the bedroom tax but has also said it will cap welfare spending. Rachel Reeves, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, boasts that Labour will be tougher than the Tories on cutting the benefits bill and says that Labour does not represent people who are out of work: “We are not the party of people on benefits.”

Drops of honey
Labour offers a few drops of honey but these come inside barrel loads of tar. The result doesn’t taste too good. And ideologically Labour is terrible. Yvette Cooper’s response to Theresa May’s latest clampdown on “Islamist extremists” who “reject our values” isn’t, of course, to challenge the Islamophobia that lies at the heart of May’s assault but rather to complain that the government has been too soft and too slow on the issue.

Labour’s response to the rise of Ukip has been to pander to its racist scapegoating of immigrants. Far from preventing Labour supporters switching to Ukip, this simply legitimises Farage’s myth that immigration is the central problem in society. And Labour’s defence of the union in the Scottish referendum may have saved the British state but at the price of jeopardising the future of the Labour Party in Scotland. The polls are now consistently predicting a seismic shift in Scottish politics with the SNP likely to rout Labour north of the border.

It is Labour’s unwillingness to launch, even rhetorically, any serious challenge to big business and the rich that leaves it so hamstrung and uninspiring — and leaking support to the Greens and the SNP. Labour’s stance can’t even be explained by electoral opportunism. The public mood — no thanks to any confident arguments from the Labour leadership — has moved against austerity.

A survey by the British Election Study of 16,000 voters in mid-March found that only 25 percent accepted the argument that it was “absolutely necessary” to cut the deficit. The researchers concluded that “the Tories have much work to do if they are to convince voters that a range of key policies are working”. Survey after survey has found huge public support for renationalisation of the rail, energy and water companies and to immediately return the post office to public hands, but Labour is promising to do none of these.

Labour is not only unable any longer to offer reforms that benefit workers in office, but is unable to even promise reforms when it is seeking office. Tony Cliff, the founder of the Socialist Workers Party, on the eve of Tony Blair’s election in 1997 pointed out that:

“Since the Second World War every Labour government has been more right wing than the one before. In 1945-51 unemployment never rose above 1 percent. There was a lot of welfare, a new NHS, 200,000 council houses built annually... There was nationalisation of key industries. During the next Labour government of 1964-70 unemployment reached about 3 percent, there was hardly any improvement in welfare, hardly any new nationalisation, and then in 1974-79 there was a massive attack on workers. For the first time since the war real wages went down.”

Framework
Why is every Labour government worse than its predecessor? Cliff’s answer was very clear: Labour operates within the framework of the capitalist system. The health of the system — and that means its profitability, the driving force of capitalism — is what conditions Labour’s ability to deliver reforms:

“So long as capitalism is expanding, the cake is increasing, the capitalist can have a big chunk in the form of profits, and workers get crumbs in the form of wages and social services. But when the system stops expanding at a decent rate, something has to give and under capitalism that is always the workers’ share. Because you can have capitalism with high wages, you can have capitalism with low wages, but you cannot have capitalism without profits.”

As British capitalism came under more pressure from its rivals, such as the revived post-war Germany, in the late 1960s and then as the system experienced a series of major crises from the mid-1970s to the huge financial and economic crisis of 2008-9, the need to squeeze workers’ conditions increased. Labour governments used to make promises of radical change and then find themselves powerless to control capital and so were forced into humiliating retreats.

Harold Wilson, in his account of his second term as Labour prime minister in 1974-76, described how the economic and industrial policy his government was elected on was altered against its will by the international financial community, from cautious treasurers of international corporations, to currency operators and money speculators — who Wilson collectively called “the bailiffs”. As socialist journalist Paul Foot later noted, “The bailiffs! What a turn of phrase! Wilson saw his elected government as tenants whose security of policy was subject to the greedy whims of bailiffs. Just as in 1948-1950, and 1966-1970, the unelected bailiffs evicted the elected government from their policy!”

Tony Blair’s solution to this problem was simple: do nothing to confront the will of capital and instead embrace it and worship the market
Cliff’s prognosis about the future Blair government was borne out. Labour in office from 1997 to 2010, far from abandoning the Tories’ drive to subject public services and the welfare state to market forces, deepened this process — and hitched the British state firmly to the US war on terror under George W Bush.

The result was that Labour lost 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010, culminating in its second worst vote since 1918. Miliband has attempted to take one or two steps away from the legacy of Blair and New Labour. So he has criticised the invasion of Iraq and on occasion denounced some firms as “predators” but Miliband remains deeply tied to Labour’s capitulation to neoliberalism and the interests of big business.

Legacy
Of course, Labour remains a different kind of party to the Tories. One measure of this can be seen by following the money. Labour is still dependent for its funding on the unions. In fact, Labour has become more dependent on union money since it lost office in 2010. Trade union money has made up nearly 70 percent of donations to Labour. Under the last parliament this was closer to 40 percent. Labour’s biggest backer is Unite. In early February, the Financial Times reported that Unite had given £16.3 million to Labour since May 2010 — 27 percent of all big donations to Labour. Len McCluskey has of course got very little for his money — Labour has not shifted left. But nor has Miliband been able to reduce Labour’s dependence on union money.

At the same time, the Tories have become more financially dependent on a small number of City hedge fund backers over this parliament.

And millions of workers will still vote Labour — not because they love austerity but because they hate the Tories and desperately hope Labour will blunt the worst of the attacks, even if many of them worry that even this modest hope may be too much. But the need for a socialist alternative to Labour has rarely been clearer.


Social Class in the 21st Century

0
0
Issue section: 
5th January 2016
Issue: 
409
Social Class in the 21st Century
Mike Savage
Pelican
£8.99

Some books are wrong, but in interesting ways. This is such a work.

Mike Savage and a team of colleagues were the authors of the Great British Class Survey, which they claim as the biggest ever survey of class in Britain with over 161,000 respondents. This book draws on the survey together with a series of revealing interviews about how people perceive and experience class in modern Britain.

Savage’s main claim is that class remains central to Britain today but that classes are being “fundamentally remade”. He argues that the old demarcation lines that once separated the working class from the middle class have blurred while simultaneously a super-rich elite has pulled ever further away from the rest of us.

Savage suggests that there are two clearly delineated classes in society — the rich elite at the top made up of around 6 percent of the population, and a precariat, suffering low pay and insecurity at the bottom and making up about 15 percent of people. In between he identifies another five broad classes within society (established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional workers and emerging service workers).

Savage and his co-thinkers are very influenced by the work of the late radical French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who identified three types of capital which can accumulate over time to reproduce class privilege. These are economic capital (income, wealth, savings, etc), social capital (our social networks) and cultural capital (especially where this helps legitimise a sense of entitlement). This leads Savage to be critical of what he sees as an older tendency to equate classes with “groupings of occupations”.

Marxists however have never sought to reduce class to a static set of occupations. Rather class is rooted in the way the production of wealth is organised through exploitation. Savage dismisses the whole notion of exploitation with an unsatisfactory wave of the hand as “moralistic”. But this means that while the authors focus on how the elite reproduce and legitimise themselves they never ask how they gain their wealth in the first place. The emphasis is on class reproduction not class formation.

A second consequence of abandoning any notion of exploitation is the tendency to see the class structure as overly fragmented. So while on the surface a teacher can appear to have little in common with an office cleaner, what binds them together as part of the same class with the same interests is the reality of shared exploitation. In fact the working class has always been internally differentiated but collectively exploited. And much of the claim that the old boundaries between the working class and middle class have dissolved is rather superficial. The old distinction between workers paid a weekly wage and middle class “staff” with a monthly salary have gone, it’s true. But this reflects the way a swathe of once relatively privileged white collar office jobs have been proletarianised, with pay and conditions little different from manual workers.

With these important qualifications, there is much of interest in this book — especially about the structure of the elite and how class privilege is sustained and legitimised. Savage argues that the elite is no longer rooted in a closed, aristocratic, landed “Establishment” but neither is it composed of the self-made rich who loom large in contemporary culture. Savage’s focus is wider than just the top 1 percent but what he calls the “ordinary rich”.

This elite, with an average household income of £89,000 and average savings of £142,000, Savage describes as “a wealthy class…which basks in the sun, with very high levels of affluence”. At its core lies a corporate elite of senior managers, ie the core of the capitalist class, even though Savage prefers the looser and weaker term “elite”. Savage also points to the way this class is increasingly focused on London. He argues that the weight of regional elites outside of London has declined since the mid-20th century with the capital now acting as the “single incubator for the elite”.

The authors offer much thought provoking material on how the tensions between a formal claim that society is meritocratic and the reality of continuing class privilege play out in society. So, for example, they note that the older hierarchy between a prized “highbrow” culture (opera, theatre, the visual arts) and popular culture promoted on mass media has, especially among younger affluent generations, broken down. But it has been replaced by what they call the “new snobbery” based on a claimed exercise of a sophisticated judgement based on individual informed choice in contrast to the mass of people (ie the majority of the working class) who supposedly lack such discernment and are perceived as simply being unthinking and externally influenced by others or the media. This is held up as affirmation of the individual superiority of the affluent.

This is a book which is weak on the origins and underlying nature of class but perceptive about its outward manifestations and forms of ideological legitimation.

Signs of recovery

0
0
Issue section: 
30th April 2016
Issue: 
413

The junior doctors' dispute has combined with teachers’ anger and the Tory crisis to present new opportunities

The government has stumbled into a key trial of strength with junior doctors, who by the end of April had taken five rounds of escalating strikes, including a full walkout without cover. As the BBC’s health correspondent wrote after the full walkout, “this is going to be a fight to the bitter end…both sides have been briefing about how determined they are not to give ground. But who will break first? Ministers or doctors?” The answer will have far reaching consequences.

The attack on unsocial hours payments which lies at the centre of the junior doctors’ dispute was meant to be the opening round of a wider fight whose real target is the whole million-strong NHS staff. The Tories calculated that the junior doctors, who hadn’t struck since 1975, would offer an easy first victory. This has turned out to be a serious misjudgement. Alongside this, the sudden announcement by George Osborne in his ill-fated budget in March that every school in England would be forced to become an academy by 2022 sparked an explosion of anger among teachers and parents. It has also has reached deep into the Tory party itself. This transformed the mood inside the National Union of Teachers (NUT) which voted at their Easter conference to ballot for a series of “discontinuous” national strikes (ie not just for one day) and starting this term, to demand the reinstatement of national pay and bargaining. Together with the impressive victory by Scottish FE lectures, what we are seeing is the return of national action as bigger groups of workers than we have seen over the last couple of years show a willingness to have a go at the government and employers.

The past couple of years had seen a retreat from national action by the union leaders but a recurrent pattern of tough, protracted local disputes, often winning real gains or resulting in outright victories. Emblematic of this pattern was the 111 day strike at the National Gallery in London, which escalated to an indefinite strike, forced the reinstatement of victimised PCS union rep Candy Udwin and won major guarantees over terms and conditions for outsourced staff. But there were also key strikes by hospital porters in Dundee (13 weeks), homelessness caseworkers at Glasgow City Council (16 weeks), Lambeth College workers (42 days) as well as others.

This pattern continues, though sometimes with much quicker victories. So both admin staff and lecturers walked out unofficially to win the reinstatement of suspended Unison rep Sandy Nicoll at Soas, University of London, while Grangemouth dockers in Scotland forced the withdrawal of new shift patterns after winning solidarity from tanker drivers who refused to cross their picket lines. Strikes at Small Heath school in Birmingham defeated plans for an academy (though a key battle to reinstate victimised NUT rep Simon O’Hara remains) and there has been a flurry of strikes in the post, often over victimisations, at Bridgwater, Cupar in Fife and elsewhere. Teachers in West Dunbartonshire have held repeated strikes and threw out an offer that had seen strikes suspended at one point. CCTV operators and school janitors at Glasgow council have struck and other groups at the council are being balloted. Museum workers in Wales began an indefinite strike (again over pay for weekends) at the end of April.

These are important signs that beneath the apparently becalmed state of British industrial relations, with very low overall strike figures, there is a willingness among some workers not just to strike but to do so with determination and a spirit of combativity. But too often such strikes, however much they can inspire other activists and trade unionists, never gain the national visibility that could act to spur other groups of workers to fight by proving that action gets results. That’s why the junior doctors’ dispute — and 300,000 teachers moving towards strikes — is so significant: they are national events that cannot be missed.

Of course, we have in some senses been here before. Even since union leaders threw away the chance to score a breakthrough over the pensions dispute in 2011, we have seen other opportunities arise. In 2013 the two biggest teaching unions, the NUT and NASUWT, struck together in a series of regional strikes which were then abandoned. A year later local government workers and civil servants struck over pay, but a second strike planned for October 2014 was called off. Two four hour strikes by 500,000 health workers — the first national NHS pay strikes for 32 years — did take place in October and November 2014, only for this momentum to be squandered with no further strikes called. Each round in this cycle of mobilisation and retreat has produced frustration, sometimes leading to revolt (a special conference of Unison local government workers inflicted a defeat on the leadership but was unable to get action restarted) but more often to a sense of demoralisation and disengagement with the unions (witness the often dismal levels of voting in internal union elections).

So will history inevitably repeat itself once again? There are some differences that need to be taken into account.

Firstly, the junior doctors represent a new layer, thrown freshly into battle, who both lack experience of struggle but also any experience of defeat and who have grown in confidence and bitterness towards the Tories during the dispute. As recently as 2007 when thousands of junior doctors protested in London over reforms to medical training introduced by Labour, the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, received a welcome reception when he spoke to the crowd. And even at last year’s junior doctors’ conference a motion calling for “strengthening links with other trade unions” was lost. Yet in practice this is exactly what has happened over the last few months. So trade unionists have joined junior doctors’ picket lines, and increasingly junior doctors are being invited to speak at union branches and conferences and, at least in some places, the BMA has started to hold joint rallies and marches addressed by other trade unionists, or in the case of the very successful joint BMA and NUT march in London on the first day of the full walkout on 26 April, organise them with other unions. In the face of repeated attacks by sections of the press and the Tories, and in the search for solidarity, a layer of junior doctors have begun to identify with the organised working class.

A second difference is that the mood inside the NUT shows signs of being much greater than 2011 or 2013. An emergency London demonstration the week after Osborne’s announcement, and when term was winding down for Easter, saw 2,000 teachers turn out, with smaller protests held across the country. (See below for more on the NUT.)

The third difference is the weakness of the other side. Despite winning their first majority government since John Major in 1992, the Tories are in some trouble with less than a year passing. The toxic combination of growing difficulties in imposing endless austerity, a fading economic recovery and a civil war over the EU referendum inside the Tory party fanning disputes that might have been containable into uncontrollable fires, more or less destroyed Osborne’s budget. After Iain Duncan’s Smith’s explosive resignation, Osborne was forced first to announce that planned cuts to disability benefits were to be scrapped and then that any further welfare cuts were effectively on hold.

This was followed by a major industrial crisis hitting the government with the decision by Tata steel to abandon UK production and sell its plants including Port Talbot in south Wales. The contrast was stark between Corbyn’s immediate demands for state intervention to protect jobs and the Tories’ floundering as they countenanced nationalisation, ruled it out and ruled (partial) nationalisation back in. And while the market threatened to rip apart communities in south Wales and northern England because there is “too much” steel in a world crying out for massive investment in renewable energy, the leak of the Panama Papers amply demonstrated that for the rich the market offers seemingly limitless opportunities to place their wealth beyond any public scrutiny. The most important point is that the weakness and division among the Tories has been visible to anyone that even pays passing interest to politics. The notion that the government can be beaten is much easier to see.

Building solidarity with the junior doctors is central to turning this potential into real defeats for the government. And here we face a problem. Too many union leaderships are sitting on the sidelines. The utter failure of the steel unions to call even a demonstration (except the one in Brussels they organised with Tata steel a few months ago) or to call for the industry to be nationalised have wasted both an opportunity to rock the Tories and the best guarantee of saving jobs. And despite verbal support too little has been done by the union leaderships to support the junior doctors who have effectively been left to fight alone for too long. In particular, the failure of Unison to open up another front inside the NHS over impending attacks on unsocial hours, something Unison health activists have been pushing for and raising on the union’s health executive, stands out. And the TUC’s attitude appears to have been good luck to the junior doctors but since the BMA is not affiliated to the TUC then it’s no responsibility of ours. And over the Trade Union Bill’s threat to union rights, the TUC’s approach has been to focus on lobbying the Lords for favourable amendments rather than any attempt at a serious mobilisation of union members to stop the bill.

Socialists have to combine incessant demands that the TUC and other unions act to support the junior doctors — for example by the TUC calling a national demonstration — with fighting to deliver concrete acts of solidarity with the junior doctors now and teachers in the near future on whatever scale possible. Similarly there must be continuous pressure for unions to fight together if possible but no concession to the idea that unions can win only if there is coordinated action. This is made easier by the fact that both disputes raise vital political questions — the fate of the health service and the education system in the hands of a Tory government determined to push forward an agenda of neoliberal, market driven “reforms”. Indeed, Jeremy Corbyn’s dramatic catapult from backbench obscurity to Labour leader precisely rested on a widespread sense that Labour had failed to challenge, let alone stem, this destruction of the postwar welfare state.

The key to solidarity is tapping into that political mood — and such an understanding exists in much of the NUT and among many junior doctors. So junior doctors chanting “Save Our NHS” on their protests while the NUT adorns its conference with banners rejecting “Exam factories” helps carry the need to support their battles to a far wider audience and puts the government on the defensive. Socialist activists inside and outside the NHS have helped push forward local solidarity initiatives, such as the 200-strong rally by trade unionist and junior doctors at University College London Hospital during the first 48-hour strike in early March, and the vibrant 1,500-strong march in east London on the same day.

The decision by the NUT to co-organise a march with the BMA on 26 April in London and the move by the PCS and FBU to raise a call for the TUC to hold a day of action in support of the junior doctors marked significant steps forward. The TUC General Council disgracefully failed to act on this call, though it didn’t rule out considering it again in the future — every activist should get behind the demand for a day of action and a national demonstration. And Unite the Resistance can play a valuable role in providing a framework for discussions between activists and parts of the trade union leaderships about concrete solidarity action.

And in every union socialists need to be arguing that the combination of the fight by junior doctors, the ballot by teachers, the victory in Scottish colleges and above all the demonstrable weakness and division among the Tories, means this is a good time to fight. If not now, when? And if the answer is waiting for Labour in 2020 then not only is that too late, but Corbyn will only survive if there is a fightback against the Tories.


Forced academisation: a teacher speaks out

The government’s plan to academise every school in England, outlined in the misnamed “Educational Excellence Everywhere” White Paper, is coming seriously unstuck. Schools minister Nicky Morgan is already facing huge opposition, not only from teachers and their unions but also from leaders of Tory councils and whole swathes of Tory MPs who disagree with the removal of parental choice and who fear for the future of small rural schools.

A slavish addiction to the free market stands behind the Tories’ plans. Their vision is based on the US charter school system where all too often you can find 50 to 60 children, sometimes as young as five or six, sat “learning” in front of computer screens.
The lessons are taught by unqualified staff on low wages and using teaching materials sold to the school by the big edu-businesses such as Pearson’s. The result is de-skilled teachers in an exam factory education system.

Two things stand in the way of this Tory dream. Firstly, the system of democratic accountability of schools via the Local Authorities; secondly, the terms and conditions that teaching unions have won for teachers over the past few decades. Forced academisation is intended to remove these two barriers to neoliberal privatisation.

The National Union of Teachers annual conference took the decision to campaign against forced academisation and to ballot its members for strike action to restore national pay and conditions for teachers. This ballot covers all teachers, including those who currently work in an academy or free school.

Since the conference decision was taken, local NUT meetings have seen unprecedented numbers attending — in some areas double the size of meetings during the 2011 pensions revolt. Similarly, the response from parents has been huge, with over 300 attending the Parents Defending Education meeting initiated by the Anti-Academies Alliance and poet Michael Rosen.

News reports of an imminent U-turn on forced academisation abound and it looks as though the government may allow Local Authorities to form their own Multi-Academy Trusts as a way of quelling the anger.

However, this will not change the fact that this is privatisation through the back door. Moreover, it will not reverse the erosion of teachers’ national pay and conditions of service over the past few years, with many schools now choosing not to follow national guidance.
We should see any climb down as a battle won, but we must also fight on to victory in the wider war. Teachers must go on the offensive now to win national terms and conditions and thereby also undermine the privatisation of education in England.

Jess Edwards
NUT executive member for inner London (personal capacity)

How do we best back Corbyn?

0
0
Issue section: 
6th September 2016
416

For the second summer in a row Jeremy Corbyn has been out on the road battling for the Labour leadership. Mark L Thomas looks at the dynamics of the campaign and the prospects for the Labour Party once the contest is over.

The summer was dominated by the bitter fight over the Labour leadership. The majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) gambled that the Brexit vote could be used to launch an onslaught on Jeremy Corbyn, who they deemed insufficiently enthusiastic for the Remain cause after he refused (rightly) to campaign alongside pro-Remain Tories or drop his entirely justified criticisms of the EU. The aim was to force Corbyn to resign without risking a vote by the Labour membership. But the no confidence vote by 172 Labour MPs (out of 230), the hourly Shadow Cabinet resignations, the fusillade of attacks hurled at Corbyn during PLP meetings (designed according to one report to “break him as a man”) all failed to dislodge him.

Corbyn’s resolve can only have been steeled by the immediate and massive mobilisations in his defence. So Corbyn was able to go straight from a reportedly brutal PLP meeting inside parliament to speak to a crowd of over 5,000 people gathered at 24 hours notice in Parliament Square, who made both their support for Corbyn and contempt for the manoeuvres of the PLP very vocal.

This combination of manoeuvres from above by the PLP, eagerly amplified and encouraged by the media, and massive mobilisations from below to defend Corbyn set the pattern for the weeks that followed. The meetings that Corbyn addressed in the leadership election last year were impressive enough but even those pale before the size of the turnouts this summer. Over just one weekend a tour of northern cities saw Corbyn address enthusiastic crowds of over 2,000 in Leeds, 3,000 in Hull and anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 in Liverpool.

Equally remarkable has been the size of rallies in areas less historically associated with Labour support, such as Milton Keynes where 1,500 turned out, or the thousands who attended in Redruth in Cornwall. All this was matched by a renewed surge in membership — with over 100,000 joining the Labour Party in just a few weeks. Labour’s membership now stands at around 550,000 — higher than its peak under Tony Blair shortly after the 1997 election (405,000).

One sign of how much has changed since then is that the Labour Right has been forced to abandon one of the battering rams it used successfully against its opponents on the party’s left in the 1990s — the call for “OMOV”, one member one vote, first under John Smith and then under Tony Blair. This was designed to erode the influence of the union leaders inside the Labour Party, weaken the influence of class politics — which at least indirectly, the union leaders reflect — and put the left on the defensive as opponents of democracy. A mass of atomised new members, influenced by the mass media and the string of defeats Labour suffered at the polls under Thatcher in the 1980s and then John Major in 1992, would help reshape the party in the image of Tony Blair and pave the way for electoral success.

Pushed

It seemed to work and became the template for the Labour right. Indeed, as recently as 2013 the Labour right successfully pushed through the Collins Reforms that introduced the category of “registered supporters” for non-Labour Party members, forced Labour supporters in the unions affiliated to the party to actively “opt-in” to gain voting rights, and introduced OMOV for the election of the Labour leadership by abolishing the old electoral college made up of MPs, the unions and members. The assumption was that this would create an electorate more under the sway of the PLP (and media) and further weaken the ability of the union leaders to influence the choice of leader.

The Labour right has been horrified by the results as instead of being fatally weakened the Labour left underwent a Lazarus-like resurrection around Corbyn. The right’s retreat from OMOV has been rapid and crude — using their influence in the party’s apparatus to exclude recent members from the leadership ballot and defending this, at considerable cost, in the courts; hiking the supporter’s fee from £3 to £25 and only allowing a two-day window to register; trying, unsuccessfully, to keep Corbyn off the ballot paper itself.

All this has been coupled with a relentless campaign of smears accusing Corbyn supporters of abuse, thuggery, anti-Semitism, and most recently ridiculous claims of Trotskyist infiltration, as if this could explain the huge backing Corbyn has received.

Such tactics are a sign of the weakness of the Labour right. Further proof of this is that the candidate the PLP finally alighted on to challenge Corbyn once a leadership election was unavoidable, the unimpressive Owen Smith, has had to try and distance himself from Blair — claiming, rather unconvincingly, to be a socialist and stealing many of Corbyn’s policies.

All of this reflects the fact that the unresolved contradictions of Corbyn’s surprise victory last year have erupted. Where elsewhere the desire for a radical left alternative has been captured by smaller left forces outside the dominant social democratic party, like Syriza in Greece, or completely new parties, such as Podemos in the Spanish state, in Britain this has taken place within the hollowed out structures of the Labour Party. All conventional wisdom among politicians and pundits dictates that when a leader loses the support of 80 percent of his or her MPs, they have no option but to step down. But Corbyn did not emerge conventionally as leader from within the parliamentary party as the figure best placed to pursue its interests, but by a rebellion against the PLP and its inability to offer any real opposition to austerity and the Tories’ war on the welfare state.

One consequence is that the weakness of Corbyn’s support inside the PLP means that his supporters are forced again and again to mobilise to defend him — at Constituency Labour Party meetings, at public rallies and even demonstrations in the streets. In the process they have come up against at least some of the key bulwarks of ruling class power: the Labour right, the mass media, the courts. This has opened wider political questions and raised the need for greater organisation by the left inside Labour.

A significant feature of the current balance of forces inside Labour favouring the left — and it seems almost inevitable that Corbyn is heading for victory when the result is announced on 24 September — is that there is split between a major section of the trade union bureaucracy and the majority of the PLP. Corbyn won the formal nominations of eight Labour affiliated unions while four backed Smith — but crucially Corbyn has continued to win, as he did last year, the backing of the two biggest unions, Unite and Unison.

Driven by the desire to see a Labour government more sympathetic to their interests than those under Blair and Brown, the backing of key union leaders gives powerful reinforcement to Corbyn’s position. But this support is neither unconditional nor universal. So Unite’s Len McCluskey told the Guardian: “I don’t think Jeremy has any problem with the test of electability. He wants the ability to implement the mandate to put forward an alternative. They’ve got to be given the chance…the idea of trying to get rid of him now is absolutely wrong.” But he hinted that if the polls hadn’t shifted in a couple of years, then this support might be withdrawn: “If there was a view that we needed a new leader, someone would say: well, you can’t do that six weeks before a general election. That’s why 2018 is spoken about by people.”

Unison general secretary Dave Prentis was more forthright, putting out a press statement alongside the announcement that Unison was nominating Corbyn that attacked “witch hunts” of MPs, councillors and party staff and calling for unity — in effect holding out an olive branch to the right and sending a signal that the Unison leadership is opposed to any attempt to discipline them through deselections, etc. The third and fourth biggest affiliated unions, the GMB and USDAW, both backed Smith — a sign that the Labour right still has friends in the union bureaucracy. Were the big battalions of Unite and Unison to turn against Corbyn this would make his position much more difficult.

Cry

The battle cry of the Labour right is “The left can’t win elections”, “Jeremy Corbyn is another Michael Foot”, “Labour faces a return to disastrous 1983 levels of support”. One point this overlooks is that the Labour right itself stopped being electable sometime around a decade ago — that’s why people like Tom Watson engineered a coup to push out Tony Blair, who had become electorally toxic by 2006, but then found that Gordon Brown, the other key architect of New Labour, was equally unable to stop the rot. In fact, by 2010 New Labour’s leadership of the party had taken them back to 1983 levels of support!

So whereas in 1983 Labour received 8.456 million votes (27.6 percent of the total), in 2010 Labour got just 150,000 more than this with 8.606 million votes or 29 percent of the total. In fact, apart from 1983 there have only been three other occasions since 1935 when Labour has received under 10 million votes at a general election. These occurred under Blair, Brown and Miliband in 2005, 2010 and 2015. And along the way Labour saw its number of MPs in Scotland collapse from 41 to one.

But how will the hundreds of thousands of people who have joined Labour to back Corbyn relate to the millions Labour needs to persuade if it is to win a general election? A radical Labour programme backed by effective arguments from the leadership that challenge the market, put the case for renationalisation, challenge myths that blame migrants, and so on, would make a difference. Equally, the revival of Labour as a mass party potentially gives it a network of activists who can take those arguments into communities and workplaces that Labour has long retreated from.

But the most important factor shaping whether workers will back a radical Labour platform is their overall confidence to challenge ruling class ideas that insist you can’t challenge the market. And this crucially depends on the level of struggle. Workers who are actively engaged in collective struggle are far more likely to reject the arguments peddled by the media than those who remain isolated and passive. But that points to the need to build such struggles.

Could Labour split? Certainly, there has been much speculation that MPs opposed to Corbyn would split away. In 1981 the trigger for this move was the threat by the deselections at the hands of the Bennite left. But even then only 28 Labour MPs ultimately defected to the SDP, which despite spectacular polling at points and winning nearly 8 million votes in 1983 (after forming an alliance with the old Liberal Party), never managed to make a decisive breakthrough, let alone to displace Labour as the main opposition party. And the ambitious generation of MPs who formed the SDP never served in ministerial office again.

A split from Labour would be a considerable gamble, to say the least — though some MPs may do so, especially if the talk of deselections was to become a reality. But more likely is that they will wage a war of attrition against Corbyn’s leadership and place pressure on Corbyn to moderate his message and seek unity with at least sections of the PLP.

Accept

In other words, the pattern of the last year could continue — the Labour right unreconciled to Corbyn and the PLP majority refusing to accept his mandate but equally unable to force him out. Corbyn did attempt to work with the PLP — the decision not to sack Hilary Benn as shadow foreign secretary after his speech in favour of bombing Syria last December was the clearest, but far from only, example. Far from generating loyalty, Benn simply continued to use his position to help orchestrate the shadow cabinet revolt against Corbyn.

Many of those around Momentum may well now want to see a much more implacable line taken against the Labour right and especially Labour MPs who refuse to accept Corbyn’s mandate, but the pressure on Corbyn to maintain unity — including from some of those backing him in the trade union bureaucracy — will be considerable.

The SWP’s starting point continues to be that we take unequivocal sides with Corbyn against those trying to depose him. But Corbyn’s position will be immeasurably strengthened if the level of struggle rises — and, in fact, this path offers the most certain route to creating an electoral majority for Corbyn. But that requires socialist organisation which is not orientated on Labour’s internal battles but is organised to encourage greater working class resistance — and that also requires rejecting the traditional divide between politics and economics that has always shaped the Labour Party, including its left. Crucially this must mean a willingness to challenge at points the trade union bureaucracy, and not just the wing that opposes Corbyn, but also pro-Corbyn union leaders when they fail to fight.

Such arguments need to be put patiently and wherever possible within the context of joint activity between revolutionaries and the new Labour left around anti-racism, solidarity with strikes, opposition to wars, and so on. And the revolutionary left also needs to argue a simple point: if the ruling class are prepared to launch this level of political and media onslaught towards Corbyn now, how would they respond to a Corbyn-led government? The ruling class has so far deployed just a fraction of its weaponry — investment strikes, currency crisis, sabotage by the senior civil services and judiciary, manoeuvres by the secret services have all been utilised with devastating effect against previous reforming Labour governments to ensure these presented no threat to the profits and stability of British capitalism.

The autonomist-turned-Corbyn supporter (and former Trotskyist) Paul Mason is mistaken to now argue, as he did in the Guardian last month, that, “Should a left wing Labour party come to power — either on its own or in coalition with left nationalists — it is likely to be able to govern relatively free of politicised sabotage from the state” because “the rule of law is stronger now” than in the early 1980s. The bulwarks defending capitalism remain intact — the onslaught versus Syriza which broke its anti-austerity stance is a potent reminder of that.

These are exciting times for the left in Britain but the movement around Corbyn will face repeated tests in the months and years to come — and a non-sectarian but independent revolutionary left can play an important part in the ultimate evolution of that movement.

Striking back after the Trade Union Act

0
0
Issue section: 
2nd March 2017
Issue: 
422

With the Tories’ latest anti-union attacks set to become law,
Mark L Thomas argues that there are ways to initiate struggle that can help stregthen workplace organisation, and prepare for clashes to come.

The Tories’ new Trade Union Act, which passed through parliament last year, is due to come into legal effect this month. The new restrictions it contains, above all thresholds for strike ballots, will further curtail the legal space for strikes.

As the excellent analysis of the new laws when they were first mooted by the Tories in 2015 by two industrial relations experts, Ralph Darlington and John Dobson, makes clear, the act is “the most sweeping and radical tightening of the rules of industrial action seen since the Thatcher era of the 1980s” placing “enormous obstacles to unions’ ability to strike” (The Conservative Government’s Proposed Ballot Thresholds: The Challenge to Trade Unions, Salford Business School, August 2015).

Most sharply, the new laws place in question the prospects for future large-scale national strikes. The Act withdraws legal protection from strikes which occur without a prior 50 percent turnout in a ballot. And for a list of “important public services”, such as ambulance staff or train drivers, an additional hurdle requires 40 percent of all those eligible to vote — whether they actually vote or not — to vote yes to industrial action!

To see the scale of impact this could have, look at some of the evidence Darlington and Dobson carefully assemble. They examined 158 strike ballots across a range of unions between 1997 and 2015. Most of these were successful with majority votes to strike. But under the new law only 85 of the 158 strike ballots would have hit the required 50 percent turnout. And even more dramatic would have been the impact on the overall number able to legally strike: 444,000 workers could have taken legal strike action but 3.3 million workers would not have been able to do so.

The strike figures have been pretty miserable over the last couple of decades compared to the 1970s or even the 1980s, but imagine what they would be like if the 50 percent threshold had applied!

Strikes in individual workplaces will be least affected and, crucially, large-scale national strikes involving hundreds of thousands, for example across the NHS or civil service, will be hit hardest.

How the union movement responds to these new legal restrictions is a key question. The pattern of disputes we have seen since the mid-2000s, when moves towards coordinated national strikes first emerged, has been a combination of episodic national public sector disputes, and a modest level of local disputes — sometimes winning important gains, sometimes being a real focus for solidarity and resistance but not able to transform the overall level of struggle.

If nothing changes the future will simply be one where a sprinkling of local struggles continue but without even the occasional national focus. This would be woefully inadequate in the face of the scale of attacks workers are facing.

How should the socialist left in the unions respond? Firstly, we shouldn’t simply accept the constraints of the law. Even if it is mostly propaganda for the moment given the attitude of most union leaders, we should still argue that at some point the anti-union laws will have to be defied. And when a group of workers do find themselves clashing with the law, the scale of solidarity that can be mobilised can play a decisive role in the outcome of that clash.

Secondly, we should not concede the argument that the new thresholds for large-scale national ballots can never be met. A recent article on the Communist Party linked Trade Union Futures website suggested that low turnouts in national ballots have occurred because outsourcing and privatisation mean that “national collective bargaining structures and processes and the strikes used to support them are becoming more remote from meaningful outcomes for members”.

The fragmentation of many public services through the role of private companies is real, and growing. But national bargaining does still exist in swathes of the public sector (and chunks of private industry) and does touch on vital questions. There is no reason why, for example, the question of pay which is still negotiated nationally for hundreds of thousands of NHS workers should be a “remote” question for workers whose pay has been squeezed for years.

The “lack of meaningful outcomes for members” comes closer to part of the real problem — too often national strikes have been called, and then abandoned after one or two days of action by union leaderships, even when they have been well supported. If workers had more confidence that their leaderships were serious about a real fight for tangible gains, more would perhaps see participation in ballots as worthwhile.

Another pivotal issue is the state of workplace organisation. What national union leaderships do is vital, especially when there is a lack of confidence among the rank and file — how the union nationally mobilises, how it communicates arguments for action to members, the resources put in place to get a good vote, whether they are able to convincingly demonstrate they are serious about a battle, and so on.

But a union head office alone cannot deliver high turnout — good workplace organisation, where the union is a visible presence, where reps and other activists are trusted and motivated to carry the argument for action and know how to organise to maximise the vote, is the other vital ingredient. And the single most effective way of strengthening workplace organisation is through struggle — passivity leads to atrophy, mobilisation and struggle develop sinews and muscle.

Solid majorities

Interestingly the one union that is best placed to beat the 50 percent thresholds in a large scale national ballot is the CWU. In Royal Mail the union held three national ballots over the last decade (2007, 2009 and 2013). In each case around 115-120,000 postal workers were balloted and in each case not only did this result in solid majorities but the turnouts would easily have beaten the new thresholds (at 67, 66 and 63 percent respectively). This reflects the fact that the CWU still possesses a significant level of workplace organisation in the postal delivery offices and big mail centres.

So we have to continue to argue for national action and we have to have answers to how the ballot turnouts out can be driven up. But the argument for even holding national ballots will get harder to win in most cases.

One important response is to look for whatever opportunities arise to initiate and lead local disputes. The impressive fight by the teaching assistants in Durham and Derby — not a group of workers with a strong tradition of militancy — have relied on local leaderships (and in the case of Durham, one that had to fight hard against the local Unison bureaucracy to even get a ballot).

Durham especially then became a national focus for solidarity. The very lack of overall struggle can mean that where a serious fight is launched, it can become a major focus for solidarity and inspiration. This in turn can provide a platform for a wider debate inside the union about the potential to increase the level of resistance. We need more Durhams.

But local strikes are not enough even if they can act as powerful examples. And if national action may get harder to win, even if the argument cannot be abandoned, then we need to rethink our strike strategies.

Revolutionaries, it has often been said, must act as the memory of the class, recalling the great historical experiences of the working class — the Russian Revolution, the Paris Commune and so on. The post strike of 2003 doesn’t perhaps loom as large nor was as earth shattering, but for the immediate problem we face it also is worth revisiting. This now largely forgotten episode (outside the CWU, that is) points to the fact that when national action seems off the table, other strike strategies can be tested and prove effective.

That year the CWU held a national ballot in the post — and lost it. But in the weeks that followed a combination of an official regional strike in London alongside a spreading wave of unofficial (and illegal) action gave Royal Mail management a “good hiding”, as one militant told Socialist Worker at the time.

A section of the London CWU leadership, sceptical about the prospects for national action, had been determined to get action and so pushed for a parallel separate ballot over a demand for an increase in London Weighting. A 200 strong London and South East reps’ meeting threatened to call unofficial action unless a ballot was granted.

After the national ballot was lost, Royal Mail management tried to tear up national and local agreements. But rank and file posties, starting in Oxford, fought back magnificently, with unofficial walkouts which forced bosses to retreat. London, which had won its separate ballot, then struck officially (and struck alongside 45,000 council workers also demanding increases to London Weighting).

London’s official action and Oxford’s success gave rise to a rapidly spreading wave of unofficial strikes as other offices across the country refused to handle the mail of offices already on strike. Within a few weeks the post was on the brink of a national unofficial strike — and management crumbled.

It was Royal Mail management, not the CWU, which was humiliated. What had not been possible to win in a postal ballot was won on the picket line after the strongest, best organised offices gave a lead.

Now widespread unofficial action certainly isn’t where most unions and workplaces are currently at. So what strategies are available?

There are some interesting straws in the wind. In the NUT, where last July’s national one-day strike has not been followed up, the scale of funding cuts and workload increase, will raise the question of strikes in individual schools — and socialists have to fight for more of these. But can we go beyond this?

An SWP member of the NUT national executive, Jess Edwards, in a blog post has floated some ideas: “If a number of schools were threatening strike action, there are other possibilities.

“For example, why don’t those schools link up with each other to strike on the same day or organise to go in to other schools to raise solidarity? What if there were possibilities for action across a whole borough, Multi-Academy Trust or academy chain? What if there were possibilities to coordinate on a bigger scale — across London for example?”

Activities

There have been discussions in London NUT about a day of action against cuts. This could involve members in all sorts of activities from small but important things like leafleting parents to bigger things like lunchtime demonstrations or strike action.

At a meeting of Unison’s Health Service Group executive last month, the union leadership argued that each of Unison’s regions should be looking to encourage and support at least one local NHS dispute over regrading to boost pay. This was counter-posed to a national ballot this year over yet another 1 percent pay offer in the NHS which was rejected with the claim that no mood exists that could meet the new thresholds in a ballot.

Some on the left simply counter-posed the two as well — rejecting any talk of increased local action as a disastrous retreat from national action. Yet an all or nothing approach over national action is liable to result in… nothing.

A far better response came from those, including by SWP members on the Heath Service executive, arguing that more local strikes in the NHS, with regional and national union support, would be a welcome step forward while continuing to argue for the need for national action. Indeed more local strikes — especially if they lead to tangible gains — can act as a way of rebuilding confidence and organisation, a central way that national ballot turnouts could be boosted.

How can socialists most effectively translate arguing for action — whether national, regional or local — into being able to deliver action? A central method must be to continually relate to the widespread politicisation inside the working class. The sharpest edge of that is over anti-racism where a large minority are horrified by the rise in race hatred.

Raising issues around anti-racism and creating an atmosphere at work — affiliating your union branch to Stand up to Racism, doing stalls and leafletting, getting people to wear badges at work, organising to take delegations from work to local rallies and demonstrations along with the union banner — is the best way to create a nucleus of people in your workplace and union branch who can lead action in the future.

And when Donald Trump comes on his state visit it cannot be beyond the realms of possibility to get protests and even some walkouts, however brief, in a number of workplaces. And that in turn would make an important step towards rebuilding the workplace organisation that can deliver more action across all fronts.

Michelangelo and Sebastiano

0
0
Issue section: 
3rd April 2017
Issue: 
423
Michelangelo and Sebastiano
National Gallery, London
Until 25 June

sebastiano_lamentation.jpg

Sebastiano's Lamentation

Michelangelo stood at the very pinnacle of the Renaissance. The revolutionary ideas of the Renaissance were based on novel ways of living which in turn gave rise to powerful new forms and techniques of artistic expression.

The basis of this was new forms of wealth creation, with production beginning to be orientated on market exchange rather than immediate use (either for the peasants’ subsistence or the lords’ stomach). The wealth of Florence and its great banking families such as the Medici was based on its domination of cloth production, which at its height employed 30,000 people.

But while such developments looked forward to the new world of capitalism they gestated slowly within the womb of the old order, with feudal and non-feudal social relations co-existing for centuries.

The new and old co-existed within the ideas and art of the Renaissance too. The new “humanism” of the Renaissance focused on the natural and human rather than the abstract symbolism of the divine, yet the subject matter remained dominated by the Christian narrative. In Michelangelo’s greatest sculptures, such as David or his Pietá depicting the Virgin Mary holding the body of her son, the dead Christ (a reproduction of which is featured in this exhibition — the original is in the Vatican), the emotional intensity of loss and suffering he evokes reaches heights unseen in western art for centuries.

The early work of Michelangelo is full of confident optimism about the growth of human capacities. The two marble statues of The Risen Christ, on display here represent a profound sense of confidence with Christ depicted as perfected humanity, a second Adam.

But Michelangelo also lived through the traumatic end of the Renaissance. The Church faced unprecedented challenges which would lead to the Counter‑Reformation and princely rule which would destroy the new society emerging in Italy’s city states. In 1517 Martin Luther published his scathing attack on the Church’s corruption, drew the southern German towns behind him, and launched the Protestant Reformation. A decade later, the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor sacked Rome and besieged the Pope for months.

With the papacy paralysed, Florence rebelled against Medici rule and established a new Republic, one of the most radical episodes in the city’s history. Michelangelo directly participated, overseeing the reinforcement of the city’s fortifications. But the Republic was smashed with the Medici restored by papal armies three years later. No wonder Michelangelo’s stunning Last Judgement could evoke so powerfully the biblical vision of the end of time — an era was ending, at least in Italy.

This exhibition only provides a glimpse of all this. The focus is on the relationship between Michelangelo and Sebastiano, the leading Venetian painter of his day but who has long slipped into obscurity. They clearly learnt from each other and Sebastiano’s use of oil to paint, something Michelangelo rarely used, had a great future before it. But Michelangelo was a giant and Sebastiano stood in his shadow.

The curator’s guide and notes barely hint at the tumult of the High Renaissance and its coming eclipse in favour of a narrower focus on the development of artistic style and the protagonists’ personal history. No matter — even a glimpse of greatness is worth it.

Pay: the cap doesn't fit

0
0
Issue section: 
29th September 2017
Issue: 
428

Pay.jpg

Post workers have delivered a fantastic strike ballot result. Pic: Nick Clark

Labour’s stunning result in the general election has changed the mood in Britain, writes Mark L Thomas. The new found confidence of workers to challenge Tory rule needs to translate into action.

Public sector pay has moved to the centre of political debate. This poses a pivotal question — will the new confidence inside the left and the wider labour movement move beyond the ballot box and the Labour Party and into an increased level of struggle in the workplace?

A public sector pay cap has been in place for seven years, though pay rises were hardly generous before that under Labour. In the first two years (2011–13) public sector pay was simply frozen for all but the lowest earners. Then from 2013 pay rises were capped at 1 percent, with the government announcing last year that this will continue to 2019–20.

The impact has been deep. The Resolution Foundation estimates that if the government got away with its original plan, by 2019–20 workers in education, health, social work and public administration would have suffered a decade and a half of lost pay growth.

But the feeling that enough is enough and that it is now possible to challenge the pay cap is due to the altered political situation and not simply the cumulative economic pain. If Labour had been trounced in June the mood over pay would be very different with fatalism probably prevailing.

But 8 June changed everything. Labour’s stunning advance on an anti-austerity platform and the loss of the government’s parliamentary majority deeply shook the Tories.

And the confidence that can come from feeling that the leader of the opposition will defend your action from attacks from the right rather than concede, or worse echo them, and moreover can win the public debate, is a huge boost for public sector workers who have often been vilified as undeserving.

The election also was a deafeningly clear signal to the Tories that simply carrying on with austerity in the old way would carry a high price for a weakened government facing the immense challenges of Brexit.

To rub salt into the wounds, just as some Tories including even some members of the cabinet started to speculate that the pay cap would have to go, the Tories shook their very own “magic money tree” to find £1 billion to draw the DUP into a confidence and supply arrangements to prop them up in office.

May has now effectively signalled that the pay cap will be reformed — and that “flexibility” will have to be introduced. But the Tories will attempt to do so on their own terms, conceding the least possible to the fewest groups of workers.

So the Tories announced that the police will get a 2 percent award for the current year while prison officers will get 1.7 percent. Both will be financed out of existing budgets and both are still below inflation and so remain pay cuts. And this is the best on offer so far.

But to paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville on the pre-revolution French monarchy, the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. Trying to stem eroding support by hinting at changes that raise expectations only to dash them can be a perilous course.

This has created a mood inside workplaces to do something about breaking the pay cap. This mood is having an impact at the top of the unions too. Unions covering local government workers and school support staff have put in a pay claim for 5 percent and a “living wage” of £8.45 an hour for the lowest paid.

Disproportionately

And 14 health unions have written directly to the chancellor, Phillip Hammond, bypassing their pay review body, to demand 3.9 percent plus an £800 flat rate on top for all health workers (which would disproportionately benefit the lowest paid).

Unison in health has been under pressure from the Royal College of Nursing which has been running a lively campaign against the pay cap including rallies and a threat to ballot for industrial action in some form if there is no movement by the budget on 22 November. If the RCN did take action it would be the first time in its 113 year history.

In both local government and health, there is an obvious question that must be raised in workplace meetings, at rallies and inside the unions’ structures — what will happen if the claim is not met? Activists cannot just wait and watch but have to start pushing for ballots if the claims are rejected. It means holding workplace meetings, pushing for local pay rallies and so on — some of which are already taking place such as the London pay march and rally on 17 October and using the Unite the Resistance pamphlet on pay for which John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has provided an introduction — effectively encouraging the argument for strikes.

And arguments for action over pay need to be raised inside the NEU (the newly merged NUT and ATL education union) and in the FBU where firefighters rejected their executive’s call to accept a 2 percent increase tied to strings around new work responsibilities.

Both the PCS civil service union and the college lecturers’ union UCU in further education have announced consultative ballots to prepare the way for strike ballots. At a fringe meeting organised by the Trade Union Co-Ordinating Group (which brings together a number of left-led unions) Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, argued that if there is no movement to end the pay cap in the November budget, every union should follow suit with at least a consultative ballot and build towards coordinated public sector strikes.

Serwotka at the same meeting also outlined three important red lines for the battle over the pay cap. Firstly, the pay cap must end for all public sector workers and all attempts at divide and rule where some workers get pay rises and others don’t must be resisted. Secondly, pay rises have to be fully funded by the government and not come out of existing austerity budgets, which can only mean more cuts to jobs and services. And thirdly, pay rises have to be above inflation.

Inflation is currently running at 2.9 percent on the government’s preferred Consumer Prices Index (CPI). But the Retail Price Index (RPI), which includes housing costs, is rather more realistic at 3.9 percent.

Labour, however, has indicated that it will only support rises in line with inflation, as Corbyn told Andrew Marr in a TV interview and Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, confirmed in an interview with the Today programme during Labour’s conference. Yet this doesn’t begin to reverse the years of falling real pay.

Historic

Any real pay fight should also be bold on low pay and raise the demand for a £10 per hour minimum wage — a key issue for the historic first strike by workers in two McDonald’s branches in Britain last month. This would help enthuse and draw young workers towards the organised labour movement and start to rebuild the unions among young workers especially — a pressing task.

The 2016 Trade Union Act requires ballots to achieve not just a majority for strike action but a minimum 50 percent turnout as well. For some groups of workers in “important public services” such as under-17 education, emergency health workers and firefighters there is an additional hurdle that 40 percent of all those balloted must vote to strike, regardless of how many actually vote.

Can these thresholds be beaten? Some union leaders are privately highly pessimistic. The danger is that their vision is restricted to political lobbying over the pay cap and to then wait for Labour to get elected.

But the current ballot by the CWU among over 100,000 postal workers in Royal Mail is providing the first large-scale test of the thresholds and a template of how it can be done.

Facing major attacks by a now privatised Royal Mail on pensions, working conditions — with pay also an issue — the union has led a serious campaign including good use of online communication with regular video updates and even a livestreamed “mass meeting” with general secretary Dave Ward and the lead post negotiator, Terry Pullinger, which got over 35,000 views. But crucially, in office after office the CWU has held round after round of workplace meetings to put the union’s case, challenge management’s propaganda and then to fight for the biggest Yes vote and turnout in the ballot. The CWU estimates over 1,000 of these meetings have taken place.

A “national day of gate meetings” to build the ballot was followed by a national “get the vote out day” with pictures on the union’s twitter feed (@CWUnews) of whole offices going to the post box to collectively send off their ballot papers. The union has also mobilised political support, hosting huge meetings with Jeremy Corbyn to promote Labour’s call for the renationalisation of the postal service.

Converting the bitterness and anger over pay into action faces higher legal hurdles than in the past. But a combination of connecting with the new political mood and a real lead in the unions that carries the argument for action into every workplace and demonstrates the union is up for serious a fight can maximise the potential to beat the ballot thresholds.

Major public sector strikes would strike a blow, perhaps even a fatal one, at the Tories’ propelling Corbyn into government sooner rather than later. But they would also begin to fashion a movement that goes beyond the ballot box and starts to build the only real counter power to check and challenge the inevitable onslaught a Corbyn government would face from the ruling class.

And a real fight over pay would have another indispensable impact. It would transform the debate about migrants in Britain. Every picket line and strike rally would direct anger at squeezed living standards towards those at the top, instead of mistakenly towards those at the bottom. It would create a powerful symbol of unity inside workplaces across the country between British born, EU migrant and non-EU migrant workers.

It’s time to shake the magic tree for our side.

After the local elections: can the stalemate be broken?

0
0
Issue section: 
4th June 2018
Issue: 
436

Corbs.jpg

Pic: chathamhouse/Flickr

Mark L Thomas assesses the state of the Labour party after the council ballots in early May which failed to deliver a decisive result for either side

The results of the local elections in England last month were decried as a failure for Corbyn and Labour by the Tories, with much of the media coverage taking this as their cue. The usual suspects among Corbyn’s opponents on the Labour right were quick to add their voices suggesting that “peak Corbyn” had been reached.

In reply, the Labour left robustly defended the results as an untrammelled success for Labour and another step towards Downing Street for Corbyn.

But neither of these interpretations really capture what the local elections actually point to.

Firstly, and most obviously, the local elections as the first big electoral test since last year’s general election confirm that electoral politics — at least in England — is now firmly polarised between the two main parties.

Labour and the Tories between them won nearly 17 out every 20 council seats up for election in May.

Ukip collapsed, clinging on to just three councillors and losing 123. The party’s general secretary was left comparing Ukip to the medieval “black death” (something he strangely seemed to believe was a positive quality!).

Ukip’s electoral disintegration might seem like old news. But in 2014, the year when the council seats contested this year were last up for election, Ukip was riding the peak of its wave of support. Indeed, in the elections to the European parliament held on the same day as the 2014 local elections Ukip finished top — the first time any party apart from Labour or the Tories had won a nationwide vote since 1910. Ukip’s collapse has primarily benefited the Tories, though Labour will have taken some of its former vote.

Shattering

The much trumpeted Lib Dem revival — they gained 75 council seats — is from a very low base following the shattering of much of its electoral support.

The decades-long erosion of support for the two main parties and the rise of challengers — Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Ukip, the Greens — peaked in the 2015 general election but went into sharp reverse last June, with the exception of the SNP in Scotland. The local elections suggest little has changed since then. Labour confirmed it has advanced, but the Tories did not collapse.

Of course Labour won more council seats (2,350) and saw the biggest net gain (79), while the Tories took 1,332, an overall loss of 35 councillors.

But the local elections are only a partial snapshot of the national picture. Less than a quarter of the total number of council seats across the UK were up for re-election, mainly concentrated in the bigger urban centres of England.

Labour gained control of Kirklees, Plymouth and Tower Hamlets but lost control of Derby, Nuneaton & Bedworth and Redditch.

And in London, Labour had its best results since 1971 — indeed almost all its net gains came from the capital (and were particularly concentrated in Tower Hamlets, Redbridge and Wandsworth). In fact, Labour came very close to defeating the Tories in Wandsworth, where Labour gained seven seats while the Tories lost eight (and according to the Britain Elects Twitter feed, Labour’s share of the vote was higher than the Tories across the borough as a whole). Losing Wandsworth would have been very uncomfortable for Theresa May.

But there was no great breakthrough for Labour and the picture of an electoral stalemate is if anything confirmed.

The results underline that there is no certainty that Labour will win the next general election. Simply waiting for the Tories to collapse is a poor strategy.

The local elections had too little of the feeling of insurgency and radicalism from Labour that we saw in the general election last year.

Labour under Corbyn is no longer the outsider with nothing to lose but instead increasingly styles itself as a government in waiting. And there has been no challenge to the policy of Labour councils implementing the cuts locally.

But acting as a respectable government in waiting with a mass, but essentially conventional electoral operation, limits its potential to further increase its wider support.

That requires more, not less struggle and radicalism. Its absence risks allowing the Tories to cling on.

And that in turn gives Corbyn’s opponents on the right — inside and outside Labour — the space to regroup and go on the attack. The outcome of the general election shocked such forces and throw them into some disarray.

But they have regrouped and in the sustained campaign to tar Corbyn and the left with antisemitism they have found an effective stick to intimidate and paralyse Corbyn and the Labour left.

Ferocity

Antisemitism must be challenged wherever it appears. But the ferocity of these attacks are little to do with the actual, limited, existence of antisemitism in the Labour Party and everything to do with attacking and undermining the left.

But the response from Corbyn and Momentum has been largely to concede the ground and not to call out the attacks as a witch hunt.

As a result Ken Livingstone, former London Mayor and a key figurehead of the Labour left, has been forced out of the Labour Party, without any real fight since he resigned, for comments that may have been ill-judged politically but were not antisemitic. The belief that this will stop the attacks on the left is an act of wishful thinking. Labour is now a party where there is no space for Livingstone, but there is for Tony Blair or the Labour Friends of Israel.

The situation urgently calls for a much, much greater level of struggle and resistance to throw the Tories onto the defensive and increase their divisions. The decision by the PCS union at its annual conference last month to ballot for strikes over pay is a step in the right direction, but one too few other unions look like matching.

Yet the potential to be bold and take the fight to the Tories clearly exists. The best example has been the Windrush scandal. The widespread anger at the revelations that the Tories’ creation of a “hostile environment” for migrants had threatened the residency rights of thousands of people who had come from the Caribbean, especially in the 1950s and 60s to work in Britain’s public services and labour-starved industries, threw the government onto the defensive.

The protests initiated by Stand Up to Racism, alongside others, captured the public mood and boosted the confidence of Diane Abbott, Labour’s shadow home secretary, to not only harry the Tories on this with considerable effect but also to promise that a future Labour government would close down detentions centres such as Yarl’s Wood.

Two other points should be made in the light of the local elections.

One is over Brexit. The results underline that heeding the pressure to position Labour as an anti-Brexit force, either through support for continued British membership of the single market or joining the calls for a second referendum would not only be politically disastrous — the single market would be a major impediment to the kind of break with neoliberalism enshrined in last year’s Labour manifesto, for example — but would also damage Labour electorally. It would allow the Tories to pose as the only party willing to act on the referendum results, especially in Leave voting areas of the Midlands and the North.

Secondly, the local elections have altered some of the political make up of Labour councils. Local government has long been a bastion of the Labour right since the collapse of “municipal socialism” in the late 1980s. But this election will have seen more pro-Corbyn councillors elected. In some areas, the left will now have some influence on the direction and policy of Labour councils. And in Haringey council, the left is now the dominant force.

This is directly related to the struggle to stop the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), a collaboration between the Labour right council leadership and major property developers, which would have led to widespread social cleansing in the borough. The campaign to stop HDV united socialists and activists outside the Labour Party with the newly expanded Labour left. In turn that led to a struggle for control of the local Labour Party and the council, with the left emerging as clear winners.

But what will the left do with the council now that they run it? As Joseph Ejiofor, the new leader of Haringey council (and a member of Momentum’s National Coordinating Group), told the London Evening Standard, “Over the next four years it will be down to us to show everybody what this mythical beast the ‘Corbyn council’ actually does.”

Of course, the first step is putting the last nails in the HDV’s coffin. But a left council needs to show it will challenge austerity, not simply implement it while blaming the Tories and waiting for a Labour government. The words of George Lansbury, leader of Poplar council in east London after the First World War (and later the most left wing leader in Labour’s history, apart from Corbyn) still apply, “The workers must be given tangible proof that a Labour administration means something different from capitalist administration, and in a nutshell this means diverting wealth from wealthy ratepayers to the poor.”

This is an anticipation of the great questions that will be posed if Labour under Corbyn does come to government office.


Control changes

0
0
Issue section: 
4th January 2019
Issue: 
442

It was good to see the engagement in the letters pages of last month’s Socialist Review to my and Andy Ridley’s article about the turmoil in the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) which has followed from discontent over this year’s NHS pay deal (“A right royal crisis prods dormant unions to life”, November SR).

Thanks to Pete Sinclair for his clarifications and insights about the limitations of the deal and to Dave Lyddon for his informative comments about the historical evolution of the RCN.

However, I must take strong issue with the arguments put forward by Susan Rosenthal. Susan insists that nurses, alongside teachers, social workers and other “salaried professionals” are middle class rather than workers.

If Susan is right then the analysis put forward by the SWP for the last 40 years is mistaken. Such layers, which have significantly expanded in the last decades, have not been proletarianised and the working class is shrinking, at least in the advanced industrial countries, contrary to the arguments we have put forward.

Susan gives two main reasons for her argument (whether an employee is “salaried” or paid a wage once a month or even once a week is an irrelevance to their objective class position).

Firstly, Susan states that occupations that require a degree cannot be working class (nursing, as we pointed out, is now an all-graduate profession).

Secondly, Susan argues occupations where there is a degree of discretionary power over your work and which confer the authority to make decisions that affect other people’s lives must be excluded from the working class.

Yet what Susan seems to miss is the huge transformation that has taken place in professional and white collar work more generally over the whole post-war period. Capitalism has required ever larger numbers of administrative and other office staff both in private firms and in the public state sector.

As such white collar jobs have expanded so they have become subject to much greater managerial control from above as capital seeks to pump the maximum surplus value out of them just as it does manual workers.

Increasingly too such workers have found themselves tied to ever greater levels of technology to increase their productivity — the introduction of computers, for example — which allow for increased monitoring and surveillance of their labour.

This has required new skills and often increased time spent in education. A more skilled and more educated working class also requires more teachers and more health workers to patch them up and ensure a return on the expenditures on their education

Yet such trends have also been combined with the erosion of autonomy among large numbers of those once considered professionals over how their labour is performed. So teaching, for example, has seen massive increases in control from above with the introduction of a national curriculum, the introduction of repeated testing with results determining a school’s place in a public “league table” and a highly intrusive and high stakes inspection regime through Ofsted.

This has led to the massive intensification of work that we alluded to in our article — with teachers and nurses suffering, involuntarily, the greatest such work intensification. Far from exercising autonomy, managerial prerogatives have grown sharply.

Such changes are not simply quantitative but qualitative, amounting to the proletarianisation of swathes of professional and white collar jobs.

Of course many workers do exercise some degree of delegated authority on behalf of their employer but this does not alter the fact of a fundamental lack of control over the means of making a livelihood. This combined with the massive increases in pressures at work, increased work pace and workloads and increased subjection to supervisory control and managerial discipline to enforce this are precisely what has forced groups of workers such as teachers, nurses, hospital admin staff, social workers, local government workers, lectures in further and higher education to collectively organise to defend their conditions and pay.

The picture Susan paints is a snapshot from past conditions long since eradicated by the dynamic of capitalism itself.

Stirrings of resistance?

0
0
Issue section: 
29th December 2020
Issue: 
464

Despite the passivity of the traditional leaders of the working class, there are signs of growing combativity. Mark L Thomas looks at the role of People Before Profit in taking these forward.

Millions of workers in Britain face an onslaught across multiple fronts: the pandemic, the rising wave of jobs cuts, pay freezes, and “fire and rehire” assaults on pay and conditions. The single most salient feature (or better still, problem) in the situation is the huge gulf that exists between this onslaught and the, to say the least, limited response coming from the top of the unions.

The response from the trade union leaderships is pervaded by the belief that the members won’t fight, so there is little point in trying. Such pessimism is reinforced by the structural position of the trade union bureaucracy, the full-time officials who make up the union’s professional apparatus. It is one of bargaining and negotiating with employers over the terms of workers’ exploitation, not fighting to abolish it.

This means there is a powerful pull towards accepting that firms, and British capitalism overall, need to be profitable in order to “provide” jobs and rising living standards. It means accepting that firms should be “viable” and their “difficulties” taken into account. Such an outlook of ‘social partnership’ between unions and employers further hampers any drive for effective resistance.

Yet the bureaucracy is not homogenous. Elements of it do want to see at least some resistance, not least to build membership but also sometimes to demonstrate to employers that the union cannot be ignored. And nor can the officials always just dismiss pressures from below to fight back if they want to retain at least some credibility in front of members, and not lose all influence over them.

In the early part of the autumn just one or two strikes were taking place among small groups of workers in any given week. These included the fight by drug rehabilitation staff for parity with NHS terms and pay at We Are With You — a charity formally, but in reality an outsourcer — and the strikes by PCS members at the Tate galleries. Since then we have seen the number of disputes turn into a modest stream.

Battles by Unite members at Rolls Royce in Barnoldswick, Lancashire, against job cuts and at bus maker Optare near Leeds have developed into more protracted disputes. The strikes by workers directly employed by Heathrow Airport, by UCU members at Brighton University and ancillary staff in Unison at Birmingham’s Heartlands hospital are also important battles in key sectors.

In some places simply the threat to strike has been enough to win concessions. Unison members at both SOAS and Edinburgh Napier universities forced the withdrawal of compulsory redundancies after they returned strong strike ballot results.

And the London-based United Voices of the World union (UVW) chalked up another victory, winning the end of the outsourcing of ancillary staff at Great Ormond Street hospital after a combative organising drive and threat to strike. This is the second such in-housing of ancillary contracts UVW has won following its success at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, west London, which resulted from an impressive strike.

Of course, in a workforce of over 30 million, the number of strikes remains tiny. But the mood of large numbers of workers is that they want to see someone fighting back even if they themselves don’t always feel confident to act.

So, building solidarity with those in dispute is popular and strengthens the argument for resistance. One advantage of online union meetings is that inviting a striker from hundreds of miles away isn’t a problem.

As this issue of Socialist Review was going to press some potentially bigger groups of workers were considering whether to go on strike. Before Christmas the GMB was balloting its members at Centrica — owned by British Gas — where 20,000 staff are faced with the imposition of much worse terms and pay.

The EIS teaching union in Scotland held a successful consultative ballot across Scottish colleges, with its best-ever turnout (and they have had four national ballots in the last five years).

Unison members in higher education (HE) also voted to strike in an indicative ballot over their 0 percent pay “offer”, with a record yes vote for strikes. The turnout was below the threshold but the left on Unison’s HE service group executive successfully pushed, against the officials’ caution to proceed to a postal ballot. They argued that it should be “disaggregated” which allows the stronger branches to strike, provided they hit the turnout threshold even if the overall turnout is below 50 percent.

And the CWU has also held a consultative ballot among its 45,000 telecom members against attacks on job security. The union called it “the most important vote involving the entire BT Group membership since the 1987 national strike”. Traditionally telecoms is the less organised and militant side of the union compared with Royal Mail. The result was a thumping 98 percent to back strikes on a 74 percent turnout.

Of course not every statutory ballot, let alone consultative one, turns into action. Sometimes employers cave in, sometimes unions use them as bargaining tools and are willing to settle for minor concessions and then throw the towel in.

But the potential for a bigger group of workers than we have seen in the last few months to strike in the new year is clearly there. That could act as a bigger focus for all those who want to see a break with the passivity of too many union leaderships.

Every socialist militant in a workplace needs examples of resistance to point to and, better still, victories that show action works.

One of the central goals of the People Before Profit initiative is precisely to attempt to create a pole of attraction for all those who want to see a fightback and feel frustrated at the lack of resistance and opposition we see coming from Labour under Keir Starmer and the unions. We need to build a network of people rallying round every fightback, building solidarity and arguing in workplaces and unions for resistance.

The Emergency Programme for Jobs, Services and Safety put forward by People Before Profit also raises a series of demands that insist bosses, not workers, should pay for the crisis. The programme represents an ideological alternative to the logic of social partnership.

It means raising arguments that social need, not profit, should decide what happens to jobs and living standards. It means raising arguments about the urgent need for investment and jobs in renewable energy, and taxing the huge wealth accumulating at the top of society to pay for it.

The 650-strong online meeting with John McDonnell and others to launch the programme, and the series of local launches in a whole number of towns and cities, are an important step towards starting to create such networks nationally and locally. And the process of fighting for collective resistance and creating a wider layer of organised, confident activists in workplaces will be accelerated if socialists raise wider politics at work.

The Black Lives Matter movement that exploded onto the streets in the early summer had an unprecedented reach into society. The Guardian estimated that around 260 towns and cities saw protests — reaching deep into British society — led often by young black people, but multiracial in makeup. This electrified millions of black workers, sick of being on the receiving end of worse pay and more disciplinary measures at work.

Taking up the fight against racism strengthens every union group and draws more people towards an active engagement with the union.

We have been through three decades of low-level industrial struggle. The number of working days officially recorded as having been “lost” to strikes hasn’t hit two million for 30 years. For the 1980s, the average for each year was 8.7 million. In the 1970s it was over 13 million!

This has resulted in an erosion of confidence and lowering of horizons, not just at the top of the unions but among many of those who have held union organisation together in workplaces year in, year out. This is precisely why such a responsibility lies with the trade union leaderships to act, to give workers a sense of being part of a serious and big fight.

But we can never be content with just raising such demands, and then railing in frustration when, as too often, little results from it. Socialists must look for opportunities for resistance — itself always one of the best ways to pressure union leaderships to act, or face losing control and authority.

And we saw glimpses of it from 2020, such as: the mini-wave of unofficial walkouts to shut unsafe workplaces in the spring; the unballoted action across thousands of primary schools in June to stop the wider reopening of schools Johnson wanted on 1 June; and the impressive wave of protests over NHS pay in the summer (led often by a new generation of activists). It all suggests fresh possibilities are arising, if we seize the moment.

Weight: 
0




Latest Images